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SEMICENTENNIAL PUBLICATIONS 



UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 




1868-1918 



LECTURES ON 
MODERN IDEALISM 



PUBLISHED ON THE FOUNDATION- 
ESTABLISHED IN MEMOKY OF 

JAMES WESLEY COOPER 

OF THE CLASS OF 1865, YALE COLLEGE 



LECTURES ON 
MODERN IDEALISM 



BY 

JOSIAH EOYCE 

♦ i 




P§5gp^i 



NEW HAVEN 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON: HUMPHREY MDLFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXIX 






Copyright, 1919, by 
Yale University Press 



»7 »f ».■ 

SEP 25 J920 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Editor's Preface vii 

Lecture I. Kant's Conception of the Nature 
and the Conditions of Knowl- 
edge ..... 1 

Lecture II. The Modification of Kant's Con- 
ception of the Self . . 31 

Lecture III. The Concept of the Absolute and 

the Dialectical Method . . 63 

Lecture IV. The Dialectical Method in Schell- 

ing 87 

Lecture V. Schelling's Transcendental Ideal- 
ism ..... 115 

Lecture VI. Hegel's Phaenomenologie des 

Geistes ..... 136 

Lecture VII. Types of Individual and Social 
Consciousness in Hegel's Phae- 
nomenologie .... 161 

Lecture VIII. The Dialectical Progress of Hegel's 

Phaenomenologie . . . 187 

Lecture IX. Hegel's Mature System . . 213 

Lecture X. Later Problems of Idealism and its 

Present Position . . . 232 

Index 261 



THE JAMES WESLEY COOPER 
MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND 

The present volume is the third work published by the 
Yale University Press on the James Wesley Cooper Me- 
morial Publication Fund. This Foundation was estab- 
lished March 30, 1918, by a gift to Yale University from 
Mrs. Ellen H. Cooper in memory of her husband, Rev. 
James Wesley Cooper, D.D., who was born in New 
Haven, Connecticut, October 6, 1842, and died in New 
York City, March 16, 1916. Dr. Cooper was a member 
of the Class of 1865, Yale College, and for twenty-five 
years pastor of the South Congregational Church of New 
Britain, Connecticut. For thirty years he was a corporate 
member of the American Board of Commissioners for 
Foreign Missions and from 1885 until the time of his 
death was a Fellow of Yale University, serving on the 
Corporation as one of the Successors of the Original 
Trustees. 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. 

THE lectures here published were first delivered at 
the Johns Hopkins University in 1906 under the 
title " Aspects of Post-Kantian Idealism. " They 
were, in their present form at least, not originally in- 
tended for publication, but a note, dated 1907, found 
among Professor Royce's manuscripts mentions these 
''Baltimore Lectures' ' as material " worth publishing." 
This entitles them to head the list of his posthumous 
works. Written as they were for oral delivery the lectures 
required much revision ; the editor hopes he has not used 
his pen too freely. \j 

The subject-matter of these lectures is one that, in a 
more biographical way, has already been treated in The 
Spirit of Modern Philosophy. The present exposition of 
post-Kantian idealism, however, is by no means a repe- 
tition of the former one. In the earlier book, in which 
the charm and the depth of Royce's writing reach per- 
haps their happiest union, the interest is general rather 
than technical, the tone is popular rather than profes- 
sional. It contains a rapid survey and not a detailed 
analysis of the period in question. Yet no other work of 
his exhibits perhaps in the same degree "the glory of 
words," the art of vivid phrasing, the gift of graphic 
and pleasing metaphor, the skill of forcing subtle and 
difficult ideas into luminous and concrete expression. It 
is indeed one of the finest feats of Royce's reflective 

vii 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 
imagination. As a work of deep speculation touched with 
warm feeling, of historical research cast in original 
mould, the book has a unique and permanent place in 
our philosophic literature. 

To literary distinction such as the Spirit of Modem 
Philosophy possesses the present lectures can evidently 
lay no claim. In range and depth, however, they surpass 
the chronicle of the same period in the earlier volume. 
There we have but a brief recital of the main phases of 
post-Kantian doctrine, here an examination of its his- 
torical foundation, its logical roots, its human as well 
as its technical motives. The selection of topics is here 
more rigorous and the interest more prevailingly theo- 
retical. Moreover, what is here deliberately avoided is 
the familiar and conventional reproduction of post-Kant- 
ian thought. The usual method of the usual textbooks 
is here not repeated. In vain do we here look for the 
hackneyed themes of a hundred histories of philosophy. 
Royce does not seek the successors of Kant in the obvious 
tracts of ideas. He searches for them in the neglected 
aspects, the buried documents, the forgotten theses. 
These reveal to him the true meaning of their teachings ; 
these disclose to him the spirit of the post-Kantian move- 
ment. In the early works of Schelling, for instance, 
Royce finds the pulse of the dialectical method, and in 
the Phenomenology rather than in the Logic he discovers 
the soul of Hegel. And, though the present study is 
wanting in completeness, there is no shirking of the most 
difficult problems but rather a choosing of them and a 
discussion of them with a power, adequacy and clear- 
ness which, as we look about, Royce alone seemed able 
to summon to such a task. 

"We have particular reason to value at this moment a 
viii 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 
dispassionate estimate of that phase of philosophy which, 
like German music, must suffer through the retrospective 
judgment of the war. During the present generation it 
seems difficult to approach without prejudice the pro- 
ducts of German genius. The war may be said to have 
created a " German problem." Shall we condemn and 
approve uncritically? A double evaluation of Germany 
seems at first natural enough. Why not condemn her 
war and her war lords, and admire her philosophy ? Un- 
fortunately the boundary between her war and her phi- 
losophy is not easy to define. The treacherous onslaught 
upon the peace of the world in 1914 was no isolated phe- 
nomenon. It was the outcome of a definite theory of life. 
The hypothesis of continuity in German culture — a 
culture largely fashioned by technical philosophy — was 
one which during the war had its protagonists alike 
among defenders and opponents of Germany. The apolo- 
gist apologized for all things German ; in the eyes of the 
accuser everything Teutonic appeared tainted. It was 
not enough to find Germany guilty of this iniquitous 
war, the guilt must be fixed upon her whole past civiliza- 
tion. Similarly, it was not sufficient to appreciate her 
past admirable achievements, her deeds in the war must 
also, since they were German, be the embodiments of the 
same admirable qualities. The major premise was the 
same in both cases. Beginning with the assumption of a 
continuous German civilization, one concluded that it 
was either continuously bad or continuously good. Ger- 
many's past was made responsible for her present 
crimes; or her present iniquities were cleansed in the 
stream of her glorious past. Thus it happened that the 
idealism of Kant, of Fichte, of Hegel became a matter 
of passionate denunciation or apology. And the books 

ix 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 
on German philosophy written during the war, instinct 
as they are with a partisan spirit, can have scarcely more 
than an ephemeral value. 

An unbiased and trustworthy study of German ideal- 
ism is, therefore, a most notable bequest to the present 
bewildered generation. It is all the more notable as com- 
ing from one who was destined to articulate the Ameri- 
can conscience at a time of moral perplexity. He who 
could with such profound sympathy interpret German 
thought showed no hesitancy in characterizing Germany 
as ' ' the wilful and deliberate enemy of the human race ' ' 
when she, in his opinion, assumed that role. Germany was 
thus judged, not by one who disparaged or belittled, but 
by one who knew and cherished the ideals of her past. 
Indeed, this very attitude of sympathy towards German 
civilization of the past intensified his righteous indigna- 
tion. The rejection and betrayal of her own ideals con- 
stituted for Royce the crime of recent Germany. Because 
of his deep appreciation of German idealism he was in- 
evitably led to denounce the denial of it by the German 
state. 

The view of the post-Kantian self or Absolute, as in- 
terpreted by Royce, throws light on the discrepancy be- 
tween the earlier idealism and humanism of Germany 
and her later realism and militarism. The post-Kantian 
Absolute is no national or tribal deity. "The post- 
Kantian idealism," Royce summarizes at the close of 
Lecture II, ' ' was noteworthy in its analysis of the condi- 
tions of knowledge. But ... it was still more note- 
worthy in its development of social concepts, and in its 
decidedly fruitful study of the relations which bind the 
individual self to that unity of selfhood which includes 
all individuals." The unity of selfhood which includes 

x 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 
all individuals — this was the post-Kantian ideal ; and this 
ideal of her classic philosophers modern Germany chose 
to betray. The eternal values which in Kant and his suc- 
cessors possess universal meaning and dignity were coz- 
ened by the imperial state into a degrading tribal serv- 
ice. Thus, what one may perhaps venture to call a Social 
Absolute, universal and supernational in its significance, 
must be contrasted with the political and national ab- 
solutism that dominated latter-day Germany. When and 
how a spiritual social order, viewed as a universal com- 
munity, became transformed into a bureaucratic im- 
perial state is a matter of detailed historical study. That 
Hegel's later doctrines, mutilated and perverted, contrib- 
uted not a little to the process of Germany's self-es- 
trangement is common knowledge. The merit of Royce's 
lectures on Hegel consists in replacing the "bureau- 
cratic ' ' tradition which has long occupied the field in dis- 
cussions of Hegel, both popular and professional, by a 
more adequate interpretation. The "World-Spirit" of 
Hegel 's philosophy, as Royce shows, is indeed destined to 
assume, in its "transmigrations," incomplete and defec- 
tive forms, which must be transcended. That the state, 
however, in all its phases, from its provincial to its most 
imperialistic manifestations, is one of the defective forms 
to be transcended, is Hegel's explicit teaching upon 
which Royce, in his analysis of the Phenomenology, has 
laid sufficient stress. For the early Hegel the state is an 
inevitable stage but not the goal of human progress. 

The view of the post-Kantian Absolute as a univer- 
sal community is not without interest for Royce's men- 
tal biography. His own doctrine of the community, 
though on its epistemological side intimately bound up 
with Peirce's theory of interpretation, is metaphysi- 

xi 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 
cally not unrelated to the post-Kantian notion of a social 
Absolute. The social motive is Royce's most character- 
istic motive. It inspired most of his independent and 
original thinking. And it is the same motive which ac- 
counts in no small measure for his intellectual attach- 
ment to the idealism of Kant 's successors. 

J. LOEWENBERG. 

Berkeley, California, July, 1919. 



xn 



LECTURE 1. 

KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE NATUKE AND 
THE CONDITIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 

IN these lectures, I already presuppose some acquaint- 
ance with the general history of modern philosophy, 
and with at least an elementary knowledge of the 
doctrine of Kant. I wish to offer a partial introduction to 
the study of post-Kantian idealism. I shall not indeed 
attempt to tell in any regular order, or to develop in any 
detail, the history of philosophy since Kant, nor shall I 
portray any entire period of that philosophy. I shall 
confine myself to considering selections from the litera- 
ture of modern idealism, to presenting illustrations of 
the problems in question, and to indicating how idealism 
is related to some of the other tendencies of nineteenth- 
century thought. Even when thus limited, the task is, as 
we shall see, large enough. 

By the term post-Kantian idealism, we name a group 
of philosophical movements which grew out of the study 
of Kant's doctrine, and which are, therefore, closely re- 
lated to it, but which are usually, in one or another re- 
spect, opposed to certain of Kant's most characteristic 
tendencies. These movements form a very varied collec- 
tion, and cannot be described as the work of any single 
school of mutually agreeing thinkers. The principal 
earlier representatives of such idealism, viz., Fichte, 
Schelling, and Hegel, were already men of highly con- 

1 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
trasted types, and of very marked varieties of opinion. 
A later representative, Schopenhauer, regarded all three 
philosophers just mentioned with an aversion whose mo- 
tives were both doctrinal and personal. Schopenhauer, 
despite his own form of post-Kantian idealism, laid great 
stress upon his own hostility to the teachings and to the 
influence of these his idealistic predecessors. Hegel was, 
of all the philosophers thus far mentioned, the most suc- 
cessful in organizing a school. But after his death his fol- 
lowers divided themselves into very distinct groups ; and 
to the Hegelian school, in its later developments, have 
been reckoned men who varied in opinion all the way 
from the most marked orthodoxy to a pronounced mate- 
rialism. In more recent times, post-Kantian idealism, in- 
fluencing thought in France, in England, and in this 
country, has led to a complication of opinions which it 
would require many courses of lectures to unravel. A list 
of those who, with more or less obvious justice, might be 
called in some sense post-Kantian idealists, would in- 
clude Cousin, Strauss, Fechner, Lotze, von Hartmann, 
T. H. Green, Bradley, and even Martineau, despite his 
pronounced hostility to Hegelianism. And, in a measure, 
most of our own American pragmatists could be viewed 
as the outcome of the same movement. Where such varie- 
ties of opinion are in question, there is no longer any 
reason to speak of a school at all. Post-Kantian idealism, 
viewed in its whole range of manifestation, is not any one 
theory so much as a tendency, a spirit, a disposition to 
interpret life and human nature and the world in a cer- 
tain general way — a tendency, meanwhile, so plastic, so 
manifold, so lively, as to be capable of appealing to ex- 
tremely different minds, and of expressing itself in 
numerous mutually hostile teachings. 

2 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
The expressions of this tendency have, consequently, 
been of quite as much importance for the history of liter- 
ature, of social movements, and even of politics, as for 
the history of technical philosophy. Post-Kantian ideal- 
ism was prominent among the motives that led Europe 
into those revolutionary political activities which cen- 
tered about the year 1848. Since that time post-Kantian 
idealism has had its part in shaping the great modern 
conflicts between individualism and socialism. The same 
general tendency inspired the early growth of our char- 
acteristic recent interest in the historical study and ap- 
preciation of human institutions ; and to the like source 
must be attributed many of the theoretical motives which 
have become united since 1860 in the doctrine of evolu- 
tion. In religion, the idealistic tendency began the large 
process of reconstruction which within the last seventy 
years has so transformed both the theology and the prac- 
tical methods of the non-Roman portion of Christendom. 
In fact, I think it fairly likely that future historians will 
look back upon the history of idealism as being that of the 
dissolution of the classic Protestantism. In literature, 
post-Kantian idealism has its large share of responsibility 
for all the varied forms of the romantic movement ; and, 
in a similar way, the same influence has been extended to 
arts other than literary; so that modern painting and 
music are not what they would have been without the 
pervasive effects of idealistic philosophy. 

It is worth while then, to try to understand this 
movement, if only for the sake of its bearing upon the 
whole course of modern life. 

But while I thus point out how broad a field of influ- 
ence has to be ascribed to post-Kantian idealism, I must 
at once admit that the field which these lectures will be 

3 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
able to cover is decidedly narrow. For the most part, our 
study will be confined to matters which belong to de- 
cidedly technical philosophy. I shall connect it with an 
analysis of some of the classic expressions of idealism, 
but I shall not even attempt a detailed account of the 
system of any one of the great idealists. In my later lec- 
tures especially, I shall try to cover ground which is not 
usually covered in the textbooks of the history of phi- 
losophy, leaving to the student's other training the 
responsibility for every more systematic view of the his- 
tory of our period. I shall be selective rather than sys- 
tematic, illustrative rather than exhaustive. Meanwhile, 
my task is not with the history of literature, of politics or 
of religion — closely bound up though the story of mod- 
ern idealism is with all three of these sorts of human in- 
terests — but with some of the central problems of ideal- 
ism in their more technical aspects. My purpose will be 
to help you to look at the world, for a time, with the eyes 
of some one or another of the representative idealists; 
and to show, by illustrations, why it was that these men 
viewed things as they did. The early idealists of our post- 
Kantian period often seem, to the novice, to resemble, 
according to Hegel's well-known phrase, men who had 
resolved to try to walk about on their heads. I want to 
help you to see why these men thought it worth while to 
view the world in this inverted way. Their exercise of 
ingenuity may have been somewhat trying to their own 
endurance and to ours. But their influence was, as I have 
just pointed out, so manifold and so momentous that it 
seems worth while to come closer, for a time, to their own 
point of view, if only for the sake of helping one's 
general study of nineteenth-century history. 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
I. 

Let me begin our undertaking by calling your atten- 
tion to that document upon which, as we may forthwith 
assert, rests the entire process of inquiry which took 
shape — in the early technically metaphysical theories — 
of post-Kantian idealism. For while idealism, in its gen- 
eral spirit, was indeed, from the very first, an enormously 
complicated tendency, due to the revolutionary move- 
ment, to individualism, to romanticism, to the whole state 
of European civilization — just as in turn it reacted upon 
this whole state of civilization — still, the spirit of phil- 
osophical idealism is indeed one thing, its technical ex- 
pression, in the form of metaphysical doctrines, is an- 
other. Had there never been a Kant, there would no doubt 
have been an idealistic movement in philosophy at the 
outset of the nineteenth century. But its technical ex- 
pression would have been very different from that which 
German idealism received between 1795 and 1830. As 
matters actually stood, the speculations of Fichte, of 
Schelling, of Hegel, were worked out under the influence 
of that formulation of problems which is contained in 
Kant's writings, and especially in the Kantian Critique 
of Pure Reason, and above all, in the central discussion 
of that Critique, namely, in Kant 's famous section called 
by him The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. 
Understand the issues stated in Kant's deduction of the 
categories and you shall understand why these later 
men formulated their problems as they did ; and then you 
will soon be on the way towards seeing why they pro- 
posed the technical solutions which their writings con- 
tain. The Kantian deduction of the categories is the por- 
tal to the dwelling of modern philosophy. Some of you, 
having made previous efforts to grasp Kant's meaning, 

5 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
may regard that portal as a pretty closely shut door — 
not only closed, but perhaps locked. And, in fact, the sec- 
tion of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which I have 
named is notoriously the most difficult passage in a very 
difficult book. But I do not believe the difficulties in ques- 
tion to be insurmountable. In any case, if we are to con- 
sider post-Kantian idealism at all, in any of its more 
technical aspects, we must make our beginning here, at 
the doorway. Otherwise, if we endeavored to avoid such 
an entrance to the subject, we should be obliged to view 
modern idealism as a passing tourist might view a king's 
palace — wholly from without; or, in other terms, our 
visit to the dwelling of these modern thinkers would re- 
main, at best, a sort of lawn party. But let us rather 
enter the house. 

My task requires, therefore, that I shall now try to 
portray Kant's main theoretical problem, and the 
solution which he proposed for it. 

II. 
Kant was, in his way, a thinker much devoted to the 
reading of the physical sciences as they existed in his 
time. He was of course a man of books, not of experi- 
ments; but the general theories of science had a large 
place in his thoughts. He was especially interested in the 
elements of Sir Isaac Newton's physics, in the effort to 
conceive the natural world in mechanical terms, and also 
in the attempt to distinguish between the fundamental 
concepts of the inorganic sciences on the one hand, and of 
the organic sciences on the other. His early writings, as is 
well known, bear many marks of this fundamental in- 
terest in the theories and conceptions of natural science. 
He was also a student of metaphysics. Naturally indis- 

6 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 

posed to skepticism, he was still led, by sheer honesty of 
reflection, to assume, as the years went on, an increas- 
ingly critical attitude towards all efforts at metaphysical 
construction. He was in consequence deeply impressed by 
one very well-known anomaly of the history of human 
thought, an anomaly no less obvious in his day than in 
ours. This anomaly lay in the contrast between the suc- 
cess of the human reason on the one hand, in its efforts 
both to master mathematical truth and to describe the 
phenomena that come within the range of natural science, 
and the failure of the human reason on the other hand, to 
attain thus far to an agreement amongst the experts re- 
garding the problems of metaphysics. Merely to observe 
this anomaly is indeed one of the most trivial of common- 
places, and was such in Kant's time. Every scoffer at 
philosophy delights to point out the contrast in question ; 
and nobody doubts that it exists. But for Kant this con- 
trast was a matter neither for scoffing nor for discourage- 
ment. It furnished a problem for what Kant called criti- 
cal philosophy. Adapting a famous phrase of Spinoza's, 
we may say that, to Kant's mind, this contrast between 
the success, both of the empirical sciences and of math- 
ematics, and the failure of metaphysics, was something 
neither to be wept over, nor to be laughed over, but to be 
understood. It was precisely his effort to understand why 
the mathematical and the metaphysical sciences are pos- 
sible, while the researches of his own and of former times 
had been doomed to failure — it was this effort, I say, 
which led Kant to formulate his critical philosophy. 

A critical philosophy, in Kant's sense of the term, is 
neither a constructive metaphysical theory of the ulti- 
mate nature of things, nor, like a modern system of Her- 
bert Spencer's type, a summary of the results of physical 

7 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
science. It is, on the contrary, a systematic inquiry into 
the nature and limits of human knowledge. It is a con- 
tinuation of the study of the problem which Locke pro- 
pounded, viz., the problem: What are we men fitted to 
know? 

III. 

To this problem, once stated, an answer readily occurs 
to all our minds — an answer which in our own day has 
become a commonplace of popular discussion. This an- 
swer is, "We are fitted to know what our experience 
teaches us." This answer to the question regarding the 
limits of knowledge had been already set forth at length 
by Locke. The English school of thinkers had repeatedly 
emphasized its importance; and Hume had been led by 
the acceptance of this answer to very skeptical conclu- 
sions regarding the scope and the limits of our assured 
knowledge. But whether one viewed the matter skepti- 
cally, or felt more cheerful, as most of the partisans of ex- 
perience always do feel, regarding the wealth and the 
depth of insight that human experience can give us con- 
cerning our world, this answer, ' ' Experience supplies us 
with all our accessible knowledge," might seem at once 
to furnish the sufficient reason why the physical sciences 
had already made, even before Kant's time, such great 
advances, and why, on the other hand, the metaphysicians 
whose fortunes Kant had so carefully followed had failed 
to come to any assured agreement. It would seem, then, 
that one might try to be contented with saying that physi- 
cal science had succeeded, as ever since Kant 's time it has 
gone on succeeding, because it investigates and exactly 
reports what Hume called matters of fact, that is, facts 
of experience. The metaphysicians had failed, so one 

8 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
might undertake to say, just because they had sought to 
discover ultimate truth regarding the universe as a whole, 
about the soul, and about God, while our experience does 
not present to us the whole world, nor exhibit to us 
anything ultimate. 

Were this all that there is to say about the nature and 
limits of human knowledge, Kant's work would already 
have been done for him by Hume. There would be noth- 
ing new left for him to say. As a fact, however, while 
Kant accepted this account of the reason why the natural 
sciences succeed, and why metaphysical researches had so 
far failed, as far as this account went, he still could not 
regard the account itself as, in this form, an adequate ex- 
pression of what those who accept it have tried to portray. 
This account was, in Kant's eyes, true but incomplete. It 
was incomplete for two reasons. It did not adequately 
analyze what the term experience means. And further- 
more, it did not take account of the way in which, side by 
side and in union with experience, the human reason is 
able to do profitable work whose results are not mere 
reports of the facts of experience. 

Let us first consider the second of these two senses in 
which the foregoing account is, for Kant, incomplete. 
There exist the mathematical sciences. These sciences are 
the results of certain principles which, as Kant main- 
tained, do not depend upon experience. Arithmetic and 
geometry, as he always insisted, are therefore not empiri- 
cal sciences. They deal with what are not, in Hume's 
sense, matters of fact. Hume himself had asserted in his 
Essays that arithmetic and geometry deal, not indeed 
directly with matters of fact, but rather with relations of 
ideas, ideas themselves being, according to Hume, mere 
shadows, or images, of matters of fact. Kant, however, 

9 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
could not accept this interpretation of the nature of 
mathematics. For him, the mathematical sciences were 
a priori constructions. They do not merely report what 
we find in the world of experience ; they determine on the 
contrary what must be, in the realms of number and of 
space. Therefore they inevitably arouse afresh the ques- 
tion : Why can the human reason determine a priori what 
must be in the realms of number and of space — sure that 
experience can never contradict the demonstration — 
while nevertheless this same human reason fails to deter- 
mine what must be in the much more precious realm of 
metaphysical truth ? Both realms would at first sight ap- 
pear to be capable of exploration by reason, in case either 
of them is amenable to reason. For if we can get any- 
where free from the bondage of experience, why should 
we not everywhere be free to follow reason into the re- 
gions of necessary and a priori truth ? If the geometer is 
able to escape from the duty of merely reporting matters 
of fact, if he can discover a priori and necessary truth 
about triangles and circles, why might not the theologian 
or the philosopher of the soul hope to learn about ulti- 
mate truth regarding their topics? Is not the soul of 
much more value than many triangles ? 

The difference, then, between the fortunes of the math- 
ematician and those of the metaphysician, needed, for 
Kant, a special explanation, quite as much as did the dif- 
ference between the success of the students of natural 
science and the failure of the philosophers. And mere 
empiricism appeared to Kant to be inadequate to furnish 
such an explanation. Hence a new theory of knowledge 
was, in his opinion, necessary. 

And now as to the other inadequacy of Hume 's account 
of human knowledge. It is easy to say that all the truth 

10 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
which we have learned about nature, or about the uni- 
verse, is empirical truth. Kant, as I have just said, ac- 
cepted that view. "Nur in der Erfahrung ist Wahrheit," 
he asserted, in a well-known passage, and in so far he 
stood beside Hume. But when you have said this you 
have only begun your theory regarding the true nature of 
scientific knowledge. Experience is your guide ? Granted. 
But what is experience ? Is it mere sense impression ? No, 
experience, in a rational being, is a process not merely of 
receiving sense impressions but of interpreting them. 
Thought,, without the aid of sense, is indeed empty; but 
sense without the aid of thought is, in Kant's words, 
blind. Whoever sees without thinking, sees nothing. 
Therefore you cannot adequately understand what our 
experience is unless you analyze the part that our nature 
as thinking beings plays in organizing our experience. If, 
however, you make such an analysis, you discover, accord- 
ing to Kant, that our experience means something to us 
solely because we constantly interpret its data in terms 
of certain ideal constructions or, (in Kant's phraseol- 
ogy,) schemata of our own, — schemes due, in their gen- 
eral outline, to the form of our own intelligence. It is the 
business of a. sound theory of knowledge to analyze this 
form of our intelligence, and to show how its schematic 
constructions coalesce with our sensations to form our 
actual and intelligible experience. Hereby we shall prove, 
according to Kant, that the a priori element in human 
knowledge, due as it is to the very form of our own intel- 
lect, is everywhere exemplified in the unavoidable struc- 
ture of our experience. No theory of knowledge which 
fails thus to analyze experience can be adequate to show 
us why our natural sciences are so successful. 

Here, then, lie the two inadequacies of Hume 's empiri- 

11 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

cism, and of all similar views, as Kant understands them : 
such views do not show why the mathematical sciences 
are possible; and further do not define what is meant by 
experience. 

Now Kant maintains that in solving, through his the- 
ory of knowledge, the problem, "What is experience?" 
he has also solved the other problem, ' ' How are the math- 
ematical sciences possible?" The adequate answer to 
the larger question answers also the other and more ele- 
mentary one. For, in Kant's opinion, our intelligent 
experience depends for its entire relational structure 
upon those forms of our intelligence to which reference 
has already been made. Of these forms two, namely space 
and time, are called by Kant the forms of our faculty 
perception, or in other words, the forms of our sen- 
sibility. They characterize us precisely in so far as we 
are observers of our world, i.e., in so far as we are pas- 
sive onlookers upon its phenomena. Yet these forms of 
our perceptive faculty constitute the foundation upon 
which our active intelligence bases all of its procedure in 
interpreting the data of our senses. All of our before- 
mentioned constructive schemata, that is, all those ideal 
outlines of objective structure, in terms of which we in- 
terpret the facts of sense, are temporal in their nature. 
Because of the form of our sensibility, we view whatever 
is presented to us as a complex of events in time. Further- 
more, every form of an outer, or physical event, is also 
viewed by us, in consequence of the form of our sensi- 
bility, as spatial, that is, as a fact that is somewhere in 
space. And all of this temporal and spatial form of 
experience is, according to Kant, due, not to anything 
external to the human mind, but solely to our own nature 
as knowing beings ; and this form of our sensibility is an 

12 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
a priori condition upon which all our experience 
depends. 

Now mathematical science is simply that science which 
deals with so much of truth as is determined merely by 
the existence and the nature of these forms of our sensi- 
bility. Mathematical science therefore deals, and deals 
a priori, with the forms or types to which all of our sensi- 
ble experience must conform. For since these types are 
a priori, i.e., since they belong to the very conditions of 
all our experience, and express our own knowing nature, 
mathematical science has also to be a priori. The things 
that we are to experience must come to us so as to agree 
with the forms of our sensibility. Otherwise we should 
not experience these things at all. But the forms of the 
sensibility have not, in their turn, to conform themselves 
to any prior facts of sense experience. The latter may be 
what you will. Whatever they are, they will have to get 
into space, or at least into time, or else we, constituted as 
we are, shall know naught about them. Hence mathemat- 
ical science, which deals with space and time rela- 
tions as such, will need no empirical confirmation, and 
will use none. And yet the very success of mathematical 
science will be a sort of indirect confirmation of the doc- 
trine, "Nur in der Erfahrung ist Wahrheit." For the 
only reason why we know time and space, geometry and 
arithmetic, so well, is because the sciences of time and 
space deal with what the very nature of our knowing self 
alone determines, namely, the form of our own experi- 
ence. In order to get a knowledge of the shape of an egg- 
shell you are'not, indeed, dependent upon a study of the 
contents of the egg. And, in a loosely analogous way, for 
a knowledge of geometrical truth you are not dependent 
upon a study of physical phenomena as such. But as the 

13 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
only business of an eggshell is to contain the egg, so the 
only value of time and of space is that they are forms of 
our human sensibility. We can study them a priori ; for 
they are of our own very life. All study of them is but an 
analysis of the forms of the knowing self — not an excur- 
sion into the realms of absolute reality. Here lies the 
reason, according to Kant, why the mathematician, who 
studies in a purely rational way the a priori forms to 
which all of our experience must conform, succeeds, while 
the metaphysician, who looks for the road to an absolute 
reality, fails. So much, then, for mathematical truth. 

IV. 

One thus sees, in general, that for Kant the great prob- 
lem of philosophy is the analysis of the conditions upon 
which all our experience depends. Two assertions char- 
acterize his fundamental position with regard to this 
problem. One is the assertion that the conditions, upon 
which the form, the structure, the organization of our 
experience depends, are themselves not empirical, are 
themselves not facts of sense, are not to be brought to our 
notice as we learn about single physical phenomena, but 
are a priori, are for us necessary, are conditions without 
which we could not conceive or define or find or compre- 
hend any facts whatever, and so are to be discovered 
through a reflective analysis of our own process of knowl- 
edge. The other assertion, so potent for all the develop- 
ment of the later idealism, is this, that when we study 
these forms of our experience, we are learning nothing 
whatever about the ultimate nature of anything that 
exists beyond the knowing self, but are just learning 
about the self and about its equipment for its life of 
knowledge. And that, according to Kant, is the reason 

14 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
why any metaphysical knowledge of the ultimate nature 
of things beyond the self is impossible. 

These two assertions of Kant's go very closely bound 
together. What the moon is, or what yonder remote fixed 
star is, or what are the laws of physiology — all such 
things you learn by experience and by experience only. 
In so far Kant is quite as much an empiricist as is any 
other student of science. But what experience itself is, so 
he insists, you cannot learn through mere experience. 
That you must learn by reflection. And reflection con- 
cerns itself with the self, for whom, and in whose process 
of knowledge, the whole realm of experience finds its 
place. For the remotest star is a phenomenon, a fact in the 
experience of the self. And the self has its own form of 
synopsis and of interpretation, in terms of which it sees 
and thinks all of these facts in whatever unity it dis- 
covers them to possess. When you consider however that 
unity, in which all facts of experience share, only the 
self can tell you what that unity is to be. The two asser- 
tions then : There is knowledge a priori ; and such knowl- 
edge tells us only about the nature of the knowing self, 
are closely linked in Kant's mind. 

Let us express the matter otherwise: The concept of 
experience, strange to say, is itself not an empirical con- 
cept. An empirical concept is one that you form through 
observing facts of the sense world. Of a star, of a camel, 
of a law of nature, you have empirical concepts only. You 
mean, by such facts of nature, facts actually or possibly 
seen, found, felt, observed, .touched, or computed, in 
accordance with already admitted empirical rules, by 
some human being, whose intelligence, whose observation 
and thinking you accept as equivalent to your own. But 
what human experience is, how it is rendered intelligible, 

15 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
what intelligence is, what it is to observe, to comprehend, 
to unify facts of experience — all this you cannot learn 
merely by using your senses, nor yet by intelligently 
observing phenomena. The knowing self you do not 
observe as a fact of nature ; for it is the observer of all 
natural facts. You learn of its ways of knowledge through 
reflection. Your conception of its doings is the conception 
of the conditions which make experience possible. And 
this conception is not in its turn derived from experience. 
It is discovered by finding out the a priori conditions 
upon which experience depends. 

V. 

"We have formed our first impression of what, accord- 
ing to Kant, the theory of knowledge has to accomplish. 
We must now consider an aspect of experience which our 
sketch of the nature of mathematical truth has so far not 
brought to our direct notice. The physical or empirical 
facts which we all regard as real are of two sorts. They 
are, first, the facts which get impressed upon us, from 
moment to moment, by the present disturbance of our 
senses. Such are the sounds that now you hear, the walls 
and the people that now you see. We may call these the 
facts of present perception. Were you to take all such 
facts away, and leave us senseless, you would certainly 
deprive us of all touch with our real world of experience. 
But, secondly, we constantly deal with facts which are of 
the type that a contemporary writer, Karl Pearson, (who 
seems to be very imperfectly aware of how closely he in 
this respect follows Kant), calls conceptual constructions. 
Let me exemplify : The other side of the moon is a phys- 
ical phenomenon whose existence we all of us accept ; we 
should unhesitatingly regard it as a fact in the world of 

16 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
experience ; yet no man has ever observed the other side 
of the moon. The interior of the earth is a realm belong- 
ing to the physical world. Yet no one has ever extended 
his direct physical experience further into the interior of 
the earth than mines and borings have carried us. Count- 
less phenomena, geological, seismographical, astronom- 
ical, are indeed interpreted by us so as to appear to throw 
more or less light upon the physical constitution of the 
earth's interior. All such interpretations, however, are 
conceptual constructions which define facts that we view 
as empirical, while we nevertheless do not even hope to 
experience them in the way in which we define them. The 
interior of the earth is very much hotter than any mine 
or boring has yet directly tested, is under far greater 
pressure than we have ever observed matter to be — in 
brief, is a realm of phenomena unlike those with which we 
are familiar, a realm in which we believe, and believe, 
furthermore, upon the basis of experienced phenomena, 
while nevertheless this strange realm of heat and of high 
pressure refuses to come within the range of live human 
experience. The stars, the constitution of matter, the geo- 
logical periods, the process of evolution, the stone age in 
Europe — these are but a few of the regions of natural 
fact which come to our scientific knowledge wholly, or 
principally, in terms of conceptual constructions. 

Now I need not here try to describe, with any elaborate 
detail, in terms of what constructive processes we get 
individual instances of such conceptions as these. In one 
sense, experience is our only guide in our efforts to define 
such conceptual construction. For we get at these con- 
structions, as we say, inductively, upon the basis of what 
we actually observe. We make hypotheses that are sug- 
gested by what we see and find. We confirm or refute 

17 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
these hypotheses by further empirical tests. We regard 
these conceptual constructions, moreover, as beset with 
manifold uncertainties, as possessing at best only some 
higher or lower degree of probability, as being in many 
ways inferior in their assurance, to the certainty that is 
possessed by the present facts of experience. Yet, after 
all is thus said that can be said about the way in which we 
depend upon present experience as our guide in the for- 
mation of these conceptual constructions, the fact remains 
that, for us all, and at any moment, the natural world 
' ' with all its stars and milky ways ' ' is, in the main, pre- 
cisely a conceptual construction, and is no man's experi- 
ence. Thus even yesterday's events are already known to 
you, when you rehearse them in mind, as conceptual con- 
structions. For they are no longer there to be observed. 
Nor will anybody ever observe them again. Tomorrow's 
events are also conceptual constructions. Nobody ob- 
serves them as yet. The things in another room, your 
home while you are away from it, the contents of any 
other man's mind, all of these matters are known to you 
in the form of conceptual constructions. If you ask what 
truth these conceptual constructions possess, your answer 
must at any moment be : They possess a truth which I at 
least do not observe or find as a fact of my experience. 
And yet, without doubt, you are disposed to view all 
these facts as of the nature of empirical facts. When is 
experience not experience ? The answer is : When its facts 
are what most of your acknowledged facts of the realm 
of experience nearly always are, namely, conceptual con- 
structions. 

Without attempting at all to analyze exhaustively the 
inductive procedure whereby such enlargements of our 
momentary experience are obtained, I may call attention 

18 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
to two aspects of these conceptual constructions upon 
which Kant especially insists. 

First, in forming these constructions, we not only use, 
with monotonous regularity, time and space as the gen- 
eral forms in which, as we conceive, all these now unob- 
served phenomena that we think to be real find their 
places, but we also employ, with equal monotony, certain 
ways of conceiving things, certain constructive types, cer- 
tain forms of thought, which Kant calls categories. In 
terms of these categories we draw the ground-plan, the 
schema, the outline of possible reality, to which all the 
objects of our conceived natural world are to conform. 
We fill out this schema by consulting our actual sense 
experience. Without some such sense materials, and with- 
out images formed after the model of sensory experiences, 
we should have no means of defining the hypothetical 
facts that are to fill out this schema. But without cate- 
gories, that is, general ways of conceiving the structures 
of things, we should have no schema to fill out. Consider 
for a moment some of these categories or thought forms. 
Whatever object we conceive, as for instance the moon or 
the earth's crust, we conceive as consisting of single, i.e., 
of more or less elementary parts, the units that make it 
up. Of such units we conceive that pluralities, complexes, 
or assemblages exist. These complexes in sufficient num- 
ber form systems, such as an organism, or a planet, or a 
solar system exemplify. Such systems possess a certain 
rounded totality. Thus unity, plurality, totality are three 
forms in terms of which we conceive all our objective 
world. Kant himself supposes that our ideas of the meas- 
urable quantities of the physical world are due to these 
thought forms. Or again, if we conceive, as we always do, 
a world of changing objects, we conceive that all physical 

19 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

changes leave invariant certain material substances 
whose nature we can only define in terms of our actual 
experience, but whose existence we conceive whether pres- 
ent experience enables us to fill out the scheme or not. To 
take an instance from recent experience, if radium proves 
to be transformed as it changes into some other material 
phenomenon, say helium, then we tend to assume at once 
that these changes have occurred to something that lies 
beneath the changes in question, and that, being itself 
neither mere radium nor mere helium, remains invariant 
through the change. Something is invariant, wherever 
change occurs — this presupposition defines for us, 
according to Kant, a schema, in terms . of which all 
observed changes are to be interpreted. And this schema 
expresses a type of thinking, a category, characteristic of 
our intelligence. This is the category of Substance. In a 
similar fashion we conceive events as always being in- 
stances of invariant rules, the laws of nature. What 
these laws are, experience alone can tell us. But that there 
are laws, invariant from event to event, and omnipres- 
ent, this is a principle in terms of which all of our con- 
ceptual constructions are made, however well or ill we 
may as yet have learned from experience what the laws 
of nature are. This schema, this outline plan of things, in 
terms of which we build up the whole world of conceptual 
constructions, is due to a type of thinking which Kant 
calls the category of Causation. 

The result of our possessing such categories is that we 
carry about with us a sort of outline plan of the natural 
universe. We fill in this scheme solely by means of experi- 
ences, and of images derived from experience. But the 
plan itself is a priori, and is, for us, necessary. Without 
categories, no conceptual constructions. Without a gen- 

20 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
eral outline of the form of reality, no means of denning 
tests for distinguishing real from purely fanciful con- 
structions. Without conceptual constructions, however, 
we should possess no acknowledgment or recognition of 
past or of future, no acceptance of the now unseen nat- 
ural phenomena, no conspectus of any physical realm 
whatever — nothing but the dream of an incomprehensi- 
ble present. It follows, thinks Kant, that it is the form of 
our own intelligence which determines the intelligible 
structure of the whole natural world that we acknowledge 
as real. So much for the first of the two aspects of the 
conceptual constructions here in question. 

The second aspect is closely bound up with the first. I 
do not merely conceive of the phenomena that are not 
now visible tome; I also conceive them all as linked into 
some definable unity which connects them with my pres- 
ent experience. For what is now happening to me I view 
as merely an instance of a process of experience which 
virtually or possibly includes all physical facts. And all 
of the other facts of experience which I acknowledge, but 
which are now conceptual constructions to me, I view as 
possible experiences of mine, and therefore as possessing 
an unity which is the correlate of the unity of my own 
self. I also view these same facts as possible experiences 
of yours or of any other human being; for I regard all 
human experiences as belonging to a single system, to a 
single unity of possible experience. There is then, says 
Kant, virtually but one experience. And all physical facts 
are conceived as facts existent for this one experience, 
and thus as mutually linked. We conceive all momentary 
observations of ours as fragmentary glimpses of that one 
experience. The unity of the physical world is therefore 
conceived by us in terms of the unity of a sort of ideal or 

21 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
virtual self, the self of an ideal or possible human 
observer of whom we conceive that whatever fact we 
acknowledge to be real in the physical world is ipso facto 
viewed as observable by this self. This ideal or virtual 
self is, for any one of us, myself, my larger unity of 
experience. When I think of you as experiencing the same 
physical world that I experience, I do so because I then 
conceive our experiences as being virtually the experi- 
ences of a single self, that is, as being subject to the same 
categories, and as united in a common process of knowl- 
edge. Whatever fact of nature I conceive as real, I thus 
conceive as a phenomenon for that virtual self, whose ex- 
periences I from moment to moment exemplify, whose 
categories I from moment to moment employ, and whose 
unity of possible experience is correlative with whatever 
unity I ascribe to the natural world. 

Kant nowhere says, and certainly nowhere intends, 
that this self to whose categories all natural facts con- 
form has anything but a virtual, a conceived, unity of 
consciousness. He nowhere means that this self should be 
viewed as any absolute, or as any superhuman mind that 
views all the facts of nature at once. He is speaking only 
of human intelligence, and only of how we men have to 
view, that is, to conceive and to experience our facts of 
nature. What he holds is that those facts of nature which 
we conceive, but do not observe, have (1) to be conceived 
by us in accordance with our categories, or forms of 
thought, and then (2) have to be conceived by us as 
possible objects of our own experience. In order thus to 
be viewed, these now unseen facts of nature have to be 
conceived by us as so related to what we do now experi- 
ence that this very relation itself is also the possible 
object of our own experience. Thus all natural facts are 

22 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 

conceived as present to a single virtual unity of conscious- 
ness, the virtual unity of the consciousness of the self. 
This self one inevitably conceives as common to all those 
men whose intelligence we accept as essentially a guide to 
our own. 

VI. 

I suppose that one may have listened to all the preced- 
ing discourse, and may still be disposed to reply to Kant 
somewhat as follows : This account seems, so far as stated, 
to be wholly an account of how we men find it convenient 
to conceive things. But man 's true scientific interest is in 
things as they are and not in his private conceptions. Now 
from moment to moment, whatever our categories may be, 
experience comes to us in its own way, and independently 
of our will. And however we may conceptually construct 
the now unseen world, that world actually contains what- 
ever it contains, and again independently of our will or 
of our way of thinking. What a priori guarantee is there 
then that these our ways of conceiving things are well 
warranted? Why might not the genuine natural world 
simply ignore our categories ? If it did so, and experience 
failed to confirm our ways of conceiving things, what 
could we do to enforce our conceptional constructions? 
Present experience, in any case, is not a mere conceptual 
construction. Why might not the unintelligible happen? 
Why might not experience break away from the forms of 
my intellect ? Why might not chaos come at any moment ? 
That such chaos does not now occur, what is that but 
itself a merely empirical fact, neither a priori nor 
necessary ? 

To answer just such questions, so far as the categories 
were concerned, was the purpose of Kant's so-called 

23 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
deduction of the categories. This deduction is an effort 
to prove, not only that we are subjectively forced to con- 
ceive all facts as being in accordance with the forms of 
our intellect, but also that we can be sure that the objec- 
tive facts of what we call nature actually never will 
transgress the limits which our intellect sets when it 
defines the foregoing outline plan of our world. 

Kant 's deduction may be summarized in our own way 
as follows : We men never deal or can deal with any facts 
which are totally independent of our nature. We never 
deal with things as they might exist in and by themselves, 
in case there were nobody there to know them. On the 
contrary, we deal with phenomena, with facts as they 
appear to us. It is then not surprising that our nature as 
knowing beings should have a great deal to do a priori 
with the way in which what we call facts should be con- 
stituted. Our physical world is, after all, the world as we 
see it and as we conceive it, and is therefore simply not 
independent of our nature. It is, on the contrary, a 
human world — a world that men find and think and 
define and verify. What wonder then if it actually con- 
forms to our necessary and human point of view? If it 
did not, how should we ever come to know the fact that it 
did not ? For such knowledge would be knowledge, and so 
far would have to conform to the conditions which make 
our knowledge possible. 

But these are generalities. Let us come still closer to the 
precise situation by showing how experience from mo- 
ment to moment gets its structure. I see just now these 
facts before me. I see this room, these walls, these people. 
But intelligent seeing is not mere acceptance of data. It is 
a more or less spontaneous response to things. It is a 
doing as well as a viewing; it is intelligent as well as 

24 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 

receptive ; it is constructive as well as submissive. I look 
at things. That means : I move my eyes, I turn my head, 
I reconstruct the contours of the objects upon which my 
gaze fixes itself. My observation is a mode of living, a 
fashion of behavior, a stamping myself upon my world. 
For after all, I from moment to moment see in things 
what I am prepared to think into things. Experience is a 
synthesis of contents, a weaving together of data, a proc- 
ess of building up the connections of things. And in all 
this active process of experience, am I not at every instant 
expressing myself as well as reflecting any foreign nature 
of things? 

Well, even when I thus actively experience the pres- 
ence of what is independent of my will, I still of course 
use, from moment to moment, my categories. It is not 
surprising that whatever I actually observe and make 
the topic of assertions has to conform to my essen- 
tial modes of observation and of judgment, and that 
whatever I am to understand must be, in its outline 
structure, such as to lend itself to the demands of my 
understanding. So far, a deduction of the applicability 
of my categories to whatever facts are to come under my 
notice, appears identical with the observation that facts 
cannot at any moment be forced upon me in such wise as 
to become intelligible to me at all, without the active 
cooperation of my own intelligence. So, therefore, what- 
ever I am at present to understand must always be such 
as conforms to the type of my understanding. If quantity 
and quality, if unity and plurality, if the sharp outlines 
and clear limitations of things, if conceived permanence 
of objects, and if conformity to some sort of laws regard- 
ing the sequence of things — if all these are ideas in terms 
of which I necessarily must interpret the facts of sense 

25 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
which are now before me, unless I am to fail intelligently 
to grasp these facts at all, then indeed it seems fair 
enough to say that from moment to moment only the 
relatively coherent experience is fitted to survive for my 
attention, as any experience of facts at all. Attention 
then always secures a sort of survival of the fittest 
amongst my experiences. I can intelligently note only 
what is fit to be known, the more or less orderly and not 
the merely chaotic. 

Now all this indeed seems to throw light upon the pres- 
ent conditions to which my experience must conform if I 
am just now to view that experience as in any way for me 
intelligible and significant. But, as you may still insist, 
does this throw any light upon what sorts of facts and 
laws the whole wide range of infinite nature must con- 
tain ? The distant stars, the interior of the earth, the con- 
stitution of matter, the evolution of species — do I thus 
know anything a priori about even the outline structure 
of these so distant and manifold facts? The nature of 
things is whatever it is. I did not make the world. 
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of 
things?" So the Lord of the whirlwind might say to 
me as to Job. What power have my categories over such a 
Lord, or over whatever power it is to which the natural 
world is due ? 

Kant replies, in substance, by insisting that when you 
talk of nature and of the great whole of things you must 
mean something by what you talk about. If you speak of 
a natural fact, you cannot speak of things as they would 
be in case nobody knew them, or as they are in case no- 
body knows them. You must speak either of what you 
now observe or else of what you conceive as observable 
by you. Facts of any other sorts than these are simply in- 

26 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
definable by you and are unknowable. Or again, you must 
so think of facts as to define them with reference to the 
conditions of your possible experience. Else are they no 
facts for you at all. Your world, in other words, consists 
either of what you see or of what you think. And what 
you think, if your thought has any sense at all, is con- 
ceived in terms of some experience that, as you suppose, 
you might have. Define, however, any of your possible ex- 
periences. Where must you inevitably place it, in order 
to give any meaning to your definition? Kant answers, 
' ' In the same totality of conceived experience as that in 
which you place the very fact which you now see. ,, For 
all your possible experience has to be conceived by 
you as linked by definable ties to your present experience. 
Else you do not conceive such possible experience as 
yours at all. And these links have to be so conceived by 
you that you can at least regard yourself as virtually 
authorized, by your relation to the world, to take all the 
facts whose reality you can acknowledge into the single 
unity of one view. You can then at least conceive your- 
self as saying to all facts, "Yes, these are facts, for I, 
the one self, experience them. ,, Unless you at least con- 
ceive such an unity of view as possible, you do not define 
the facts of your world as, for you, genuine facts at all. 
Only of such phenomena can you speak. With things in 
themselves you have, in your knowledge, nothing what- 
ever to do. 

Hence, as Kant insists, in acknowledging facts as real, 
you have to view such facts as determined in their nature 
by the very conditions which make the unity of your pres- 
ent experience possible. Whatever object is now before 
you, and is observed and noted by you, plainly has a 
structure whose outlines your own nature as an intelli- 

27 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

gent user of your categories determines. And, even so, 
whatever object is not now before you, it is still conceived 
as a real or as a possible fact of nature, is conceived as 
virtually yours to observe, to define and report, to con- 
nect with the present and with all other facts into a sin- 
gle united whole of experiences. Nature is real for you 
in so far as you can conceive that were it not for your 
empirical limitations of consciousness you could ob- 
serve all its facts at one glance. Hence, all natural facts, 
whatever they are, must be viewed by you as if an intel- 
ligence, virtually identical with your own, determined, 
not indeed their empirical details, but their general out- 
lines in conformity with the laws of your intelligence, 
constructed them as if to exemplify your categories, drew 
them, so to speak, as a geometer draws lines, put into 
them that intelligible structure which you now think 
into present facts. As we have already pointed out, this 
virtual intelligence, to whose categories whatever facts 
you are to regard as real must conform, is indeed not, 
for Kant, any concrete or absolute or divine intelligence 
at all, but is simply that presupposed virtual unity of 
consciousness in conformity with whose categories you 
have to think facts in order to conceive them real at all. 
For if what I now note has to conform to the laws of my 
intelligence in order to become notable, what I conceive 
as real has still to be conceived as possibly observable, 
not only in its own structure but in those relations 
which bind it, with all other real facts, into the unity of 
a single conceivable and possible observation. 

Let us briefly sum up this whole lengthy survey. It is 
indeed true, according to Kant, that our knowledge is 
limited to facts of experience. But it is also true that we 
know a priori, and in outline, what the structure of these 

28 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE 
facts must be. In so far as this structure is simply one of 
time and space we can define it a priori by means of a 
mathematical science of those forms of all our observa- 
tion which are called time and space. Such a science is 
not empirical, and yet is possible only because it 
predetermines what the mathematical forms of all empir- 
ical objects must be. Similarly, there is a further science 
a priori of the formal outline structure to which all phys- 
ical objects and relations and laws of objects must con- 
form. This science of the very conditions which every 
definable object of common sense and of our natural 
science must illustrate, tells us in advance, not what facts 
we shall find, but what sort of unity all experience must 
possess in order to be conceived as our possible experi- 
ence in any sense whatever. These conditions of the 
unity of possible experience are our categories, our ways 
of conceiving and of describing things. We conceive them 
as the laws in accordance with which a certain conceived 
self, identical in its intelligent nature with our own 
intellect, virtually constructs for us all natural facts out 
of the raw material which sense from moment to moment 
presents. This virtual self, and its understanding, we 
must conceive as the source of the types to which all 
natural laws and facts must conform. 

Such, in summary, is Kant's deduction of the cate- 
gories, his attempted proof that all natural facts must 
conform a priori to the conditions which our intelligence 
determines. Essential features of his attempted proof are 
(1) the assertion that all natural facts are phenomena, 
not things as they would or might be in case nobody knew 
them; and (2) his view that all phenomena, as possible 
objects of experience, must conform to the laws of the 
possible unity of consciousness of a single self whose 

29 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
complete experience we never attain but are always seek- 
ing, and whose nature we conceive as virtually identical 
with the very intelligence that from moment to moment 
gives order to our passing experience. 



30 



LECTURE II. 

THE MODIFICATION OF KANT'S 
CONCEPTION OF THE SELF. 

I POINTED out in beginning the last lecture that 
the present course can undertake no connected his- 
tory of the idealistic movement, but is limited to a 
sketch of some of its principal conceptions and to illus- 
trations of its manner of thinking. You will therefore 
not demand of me any detailed account of the steps that 
led from the first philosophical discussions which took 
place after Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason 
to the time when the post-Kantian idealistic movement 
was in full swing. In our first lecture I gave an outline 
of the main thoughts of Kant's deduction of the cate- 
gories. I asserted that out of these thoughts the principal 
considerations which the later idealism emphasized may 
be said to have developed. My present task is to indicate, 
in the most general way, how this development took 
place. But I shall not attempt to portray the annals of 
philosophical thought in the closing years of the eight- 
eenth century. 

I. 

Kant's deduction of the categories, as we saw, made 
prominent what we may now restate as four distinct but 
closely related thoughts. The first of these has become a 
commonplace of all modern philosophy. It is the thought 
that we do not know things as they are or as they might 

31 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

be. in themselves, that is, apart from knowledge, but we 
know only phenomena, that is, things as they appear to 
us. In stating this thought, Kant made especially promi- 
nent one aspect of it, namely the view that all facts which 
can be known to us are facts determined in their general 
and necessary types by whatever mental conditions make 
knowledge possible for us. We can never know what the 
facts would be apart from the occurrence of knowledge 
itself ; we can only know facts as the process of knowledge 
not only colors but actually defines and determines their 
appearance. The mind sees itself in all it sees. There is 
no way of telling what the world would be were there 
no intelligence to observe it. The world that we know 
is the world that our intelligence observes; and the 
nature of the intelligence is, therefore, an essential factor 
in the constitution of phenomena. 

The second thought which Kant's deduction makes 
prominent is the thesis that we can know, not only in gen- 
eral but in detail, through reflection, just what these 
necessary and universal conditions are upon which our 
knowledge itself depends. For these conditions are no 
mystery, such as would be the things in themselves, but 
are due to our own intelligence, whose workings we have 
a right to know. These conditions, in fact, constitute what 
Kant calls the form of our known world. They are time, 
space, and the categories of our understanding. These 
as conditions of our knowledge predetermine the outline 
structure of our known universe. You do not know 
what physical things there are on the other side of the 
moon. But you are sure that there is space there and 
that space has in the lunar regions the same geometrical 
characters as the space in this room. You do not know 
precisely what events occurred in prehistoric times. But 

32 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
you are confident that time itself had then the same 
formal characters as now. The geometrical and the tem- 
poral outlines of all parts of your world is, thus, prede- 
termined by the form of your consciousness of time and 
of space. Furthermore, in Kant's opinion, you define, in 
certain outline schemes, that structure of the world, as a 
system of units and of complexes, of quantities and of 
qualities, of substances and of laws — that structure 
which, according to him, the categories of your intellect 
predetermine. You do so although you cannot prede- 
termine how this outline structure is to be filled out, but 
must leave to experience to show what units, what com- 
plexes, what quantities and qualities, what substances 
and laws, nature is to present to you. Space, time, and 
the categories, are thus, according to Kant, the a priori 
aspects of knowledge. This does not mean that they are 
innate ideas, such as Locke assailed, and such as should 
belong to the psychological furniture of the mind at 
birth. What Kant means is simply that space, time, and 
the categories are the forms logically characteristic of 
our intelligence whenever and however it develops, so 
that if we did not interpret facts in terms of these forms, 
we should simply have no human intelligence whatever, 
but should be beings of some other type, whose states of 
mind, whatever else they then might be, would at least 
not be human thoughts. When Kant calls these forms of 
our intelligence a priori forms, he means simply that 
every act of our mature intelligence must make use of 
these forms in defining the outline sketch or scheme of 
that world in which we find all our facts. His view is 
that a fact is a fact for us only in case it can take 
its place somewhere in such a scheme as our intelligence 
outlines a priori. 

33 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
The third thought which Kant's deduction emphasizes 
is the thought that these a priori forms are of no use to us 
whatever except in so far as we employ the data of experi- 
ence to fill out the forms. My outline scheme of my world 
is indeed indispensable to me ; and the word a priori in 
so far means for Kant simply the same as indispensable. 
But this outline is meaningless unless it gets a filling. 
The form is vain without the matter. And the form can- 
not furnish its own matter, cannot fill out its own out- 
lines. It is my experience which gives me the matter. My 
forms never tell me of themselves the material facts that 
the senses are to show. Thus, for example, every physical 
phenomenon must be in space, and so must conform to 
the laws of geometry. That is, for Kant, an a priori truth. 
But geometry cannot tell me anything about what physi- 
cal facts are in space. That is to be learned only by 
experience. Kant's principle then is that the forms of the 
intelligence are nothing but the formal conditions of our 
possible experience. And that again is precisely why they 
tell us nothing about any truth regarding a world beyond 
experience. Our knowledge is not enlarged by the a priori 
forms beyond the range of experience. We know through 
them only the conditions which are indispensable in case 
experience is to be obtained, held fast, described, and 
rendered intelligible. 

The fourth characteristic thought in the deduction is 
the thought that we conceive all our experience as unified, 
as connected, as interrelated, in so far as we view the 
whole realm of knowable facts as the experience of one 
virtual self whose time and space forms, whose cate- 
gories, whose data of knowledge, whose possible experi- 
ences, form the topic with which all our sciences are 
busied. This self we view as one, although we can never 

34 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
find out the ultimate basis of its unity or its deeper 
nature. We attribute intelligence to other men only by 
viewing their selves as, for purposes of mutual compre- 
hension, one, in intelligent selfhood, with our own self. 
The knowable world is the realm of the possible experi- 
ence of this virtual self to whose one experience we inev- 
itably refer any natural fact. This one self is indeed, for 
Kant, as we saw, not a knowable metaphysical entity, but 
merely a formal presupposition of the theory of knowl- 
edge. To say, ''This is a fact in the world,' ' is to say, 
"This I view as, under definite conditions, a possible 
experience of mine. ' ' To say, ' ' Other men know the same 
physical facts that I know," is to say, "I accept other 
men 's experience as virtually in the same unity of experi- 
ence in which I myself am." To say, "Facts are subject 
to the forms of intelligence, to the categories, to time, to 
space," is to say, "These forms are the forms of the 
experience of the self. All experiences are parts of this 
conceived single experience. These forms are the forms 
of the intelligence of the self." 

This is Kant's conception of the nature and the con- 
ditions of knowledge. 

II. 

Now it is easy to see that such a view is in somewhat 
unstable equilibrium. It is a marvelous synthesis of 
motives which most men find very conflicting. I have 
tried, in my brief exposition, to be as just to these motives 
as the case permits. But my very statement must arouse 
a feeling to which Kant's contemporaries gave frequent 
expression. This feeling is essentially this, that in order 
to get into the realm of Kant's theory of knowledge — in 
order to view facts and to define truth as he did — you 
have to admit conceptions which, in their turn, seem to 

35 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
render it impossible to remain permanently in that realm 
when once you have got in. Kant had a very singular 
power of holding his judgment suspended regarding mat- 
ters that almost any disciple of Kant is at once tempted to 
decide, and to decide in a way that leads to a modification 
of the Kantian doctrines." Kant was curiously able to 
regard as unanswerable certain questions which almost 
any man who even temporarily assumes a Kantian posi- 
tion insists upon asking, and is almost certain to attempt 
an answer.- You may or you may not in the end come to 
agree with Kant. In any case it is easy to understand the 
temptations by which his disciples and his critics were 
moved when they proceeded to modify what they had 
learned from him as soon as they had learned it. Let us 
consider a little some of these elements of instability 
which a closer consideration shows to exist in the Kantian 
doctrine. 

The first point which here meets our notice is the 
famous problem regarding the "things in themselves." 

We know, said Kant, only phenomena, only things as 
they appear to beings whose unity of experience, whose 
forms of intelligence, are ours. We do not know things as 
they are when nobody, or nobody like ourselves, knows 
them. One may at once reply to Kant, "What do you 
mean, then, by your things in themselves, which are, but 
are unknowable ? Do you mean merely to suggest the bare 
possibility, the purely abstract hypothesis, that, apart 
from all human knowledge, there might be an object or a 
world of objects, that nobody such as we mortals are 
knew or could know ? Do you merely mean to say that if 
there be, or if there were, any such things in themselves, 
we, who know only in our own way, and according to 
our own lights, could not find such facts amongst our 

36 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
phenomena ? Or, on the other hand, do you mean directly 
to assert that there are things in themselves — a world of 
indubitable facts existent apart from all human knowl- 
edge, a supersensuous realm, a beyond — and that we 
mortals have no access to that realm, being confined to 
mere phenomena/' 

Kant unquestionably meant to hold the second of these 
two views. To his mind there was never a doubt that, 
quite apart from human knowledge, there is an abso- 
lutely real world to which we can apply the name "the 
world of things in themselves." To this world, in fact, 
even we ourselves belong, according to Kant, in so far as 
our own selves have some basis, to us at present unknow- 
able, some root grounded in the nature of things outside 
of our own present conscious knowledge, but real never- 
theless in a sense in which no phenomenon, mental or 
physical, is ever real. Even our own personal conscious- 
ness never shows us what we ourselves are. Yet that we 
are is indubitable. Our true self is thus not our conscious 
self. Beneath the phenomena of our inner life, beneath 
our feelings, our thoughts, our phenomenal character, our 
apparent motives, there is the real man, the self of the 
self, the heart of hearts within us, or rather, as Kant 
would prefer to say, the genuine will that in each one of 
us is only phenomenally indicated by what he seems to be 
doing in the phenomenal world. Kant held this view, in 
case of the self of each one of us, for reasons which he 
could not articulate in purely theoretical terms, but 
which his ethical philosophy, developed in his later work 
called the Critique of Practical Reason, made especially 
prominent. Observe the phenomena of your inner life. 
They come and go like other matters of experience. Look- 
ing at them theoretically, you can define their form 

37 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
a priori, somewhat as you can define the outline form of 
other phenomena. Unlike other phenomena, those of the 
mind are viewed by you as taking place simply in time, 
and not, like material phenomena, as also occupying 
space. But you view these mental phenomena as facts 
subject to the types of law which your categories deter- 
mine. If you study psychology, you try to reduce the 
mental phenomena to an intelligible system of facts of 
experience, just as you treat other phenomena. In this 
way you learn, not what you really are, but how you 
seem to yourself to be. But when you act, when you 
choose something, you nevertheless have a certain prac- 
tical faith which you express by saying, "I did this 
deed; nobody else did it. I am the true source of this 
deed, which originated nowhere else." This faith is, 
according to Kant, incapable of any psychological verifi- 
cation by any study of mental phenomena. If you observe 
your inner states, you can only note a certain sequence of 
experiences, of feelings, of interests, of images, and a 
certain relation between these states and the outer phe- 
nomena, the movements of your body. You cannot see 
where your mental states come from. As psychologist you 
are interested merely in attempting to connect these 
states of yours with other phenomena, according to laws 
which exemplify the categories of your understanding. 
But no such discovery of how your mental states are 
psychologically caused is ever just to the demand of what 
Kant calls your practical reason. For the practical reason 
says, "lam the author of my own deeds. ' ' Now, in your 
inner life, you never observe this author of your deeds. 
There is nothing in the realm of mental phenomena that 
appears, or that can appear to be the first author, the 
actual doer, or originator of anything whatever. The 

38 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
inner life shows you only states of mind which your 
understanding views as the result of various antecedent 
phenomenal causes ; and this chain of antecedents you are 
obliged to extend backwards indefinitely, without ever 
being able to conceive its temporal or phenomenal origin. 
None the less, the practical reason, in passing moral judg- 
ments, inevitably says, U I am, for I ought to be, the ori- 
gin, the source of my own deeds." And the faith thus 
asserted is, for Kant, rationally as unconquerable as it is, 
for us, unverifiable. This is the faith which Kant defines^ 
in his Critique of Practical Reason, as the postulate of 
the freedom of the will. 

Since the phenomenal or empirical self of the inner 
life, the "me," is thus viewed by our understanding as 
an effect of conditions, never as an originator of any- 
thing, while the moral consciousness inevitably, and, as 
Kant holds, rightly, believes that I am in very truth the 
initiator of my deeds, it follows, according to Kant, that 
the true self is no phenomenon of the inner life, is not 
presented to our observant consciousness, but has a re- 
ality of which we are not now conscious at all, a char- 
acter which no phenomenal heredity and no gradual 
formation of observable habits can determine, a nature 
which no introspection reveals. This true self is no fact 
in space or in time. It is subject to none of the categories 
of our understanding. It is to us unknowable, but indu- 
bitable — undiscoverable in inner experience, but re- 
sponsible for all our activity. It is our ethical postulate, 
but not our verifiable datum. It is not the psychological 
"me," but the ethical "I." 

To sum up: This doctrine, which Kant develops at 
length in his ethics, has an essentially practical basis. 
We cannot consciously observe our own real nature. But 

39 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
we act as if we had one, for which we are ethically re- 
sponsible. And we ought so to act. In his ethics Kant is 
guided by what, in his opinion, is a perfectly rational 
faith that each of us possesses, or rather is, a true ego, 
now out of our own range of observation, but absolutely 
real; the phenomena of the inner life are only the 
shadow, so to speak, of this true ego, the mere hint that 
it gives to the understanding of how it displays and 
hides itself. 

Now just as Kant thus feels sure of a true ego, which 
is no phenomenon of consciousness, but which is the true 
author of our deeds, the very life of our will, he likewise 
finds indubitable, although never phenomenally veri- 
fiable, the view that behind all external phenomena 
there are genuine things in themselves, as unknown to 
our intellect as they are impenetrable to our senses. Yet 
without these things in themselves, as Kant holds, our 
senses would have no contents to present to our thought, 
and our thought no phenomena to conceive in accordance 
with the categories of the understanding. The things in 
themselves being other than the true ego somehow af- 
fect our true ego. The result is first that our senses are 
impressed by certain data, and then that the understand- 
ing is aroused to apply its forms to the intelligent con- 
ception of these data. As a consequence, we come to see 
the phenomena before us and to view physical objects 
as real. The physical objects are indeed only phenomena. 
The phenomena are the show of an otherwise unknowa- 
ble yet absolutely real world. 

So far* Kant's view of the " things in themselves, ■ ' — a 
doctrine partly inarticulate and partly ethical, at once 
the deepest and the least satisfactory of his personal pre- 
suppositions in philosophy. • 

40 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
III. 

Kant's followers and critics have nearly always found 
this view, as I said before, unstable. It is one thing to 
say : We know things as they appear to us. It is another 
thing to say: We know that there are absolutely real 
things which nevertheless do not appear to us, and which 
never can appear to us. The inevitable question arises: 
How are we able to know so much, and yet so little about 
these things in themselves ? So much ; for although they 
never appear in our experience, and although we never 
verify their presence, as we verify phenomenal facts, we 
yet somehow know that they are. So little ; for although 
we thus know that they are, we can never, by any pos- 
sibility, learn what they are, so long as we are in this 
present form of life, and are possessed of any human 
type of knowledge whatever. 

This question, once raised, refuses to be answered 
without a revision of the Kantian concept of the things 
in themselves. The simplest revision would seem to be 
one which had some part in forming the views of the 
post-Kantian idealists. This simplest revision would in- 
volve a mere dropping of this concept, as a paradoxical 
one, incapable of definite articulation. If knowledge is of 
phenomena, why talk of any world but the world of phe- 
nomena? If all the sciences are concerned simply with 
the laws of phenomena, why pretend to acknowledge the 
existence of things in themselves, beyond all possible 
knowledge? To be sure, both science and common sense 
intend to deal with a real world and not with a world of 
fantasies or of merely present mental states. But then 
Kant's world of phenomena is not an unreal world, nor 
is it a world merely of present sense perception. It is a 
world of orderly possibilities of experience. Its facts and 

41 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
laws are valid for every man, and are capable of being 
tested in definite ways by processes which involve turn- 
ing possible experiences into actually present experi- 
ences. A visible fixed star is indeed a phenomenon. It is 
not on that account something which, for Kant, is subjec- 
tive. It is an objective phenomenon, for all astronomers 
can observe it, and can define its apparent place by the 
same astronomical coordinates and can verify the defi- 
nition. We eat and drink, we buy and sell, we wear and 
we store up in our houses, not things in themselves, but 
phenomena. Yet Kant holds, like any common sense man, 
that all these phenomena are objective, and are in no 
wise phantasms. What makes them objective is that they 
are subject to definite empirical laws. Kant has shown, 
as he thinks, why these laws hold for phenomena. His 
deduction of the categories was concerned with that 
problem. In any case, whether you accept Kant's deduc- 
tion or not, the phenomena are the facts about our world 
which alone interest our science. Hence one may well ask 
what good the things in themselves are to anybody, since 
one can neither investigate, nor possess, nor consume, 
nor even define them. 

Nevertheless the case of the true self, the free agent, 
of Kant's ethical doctrine, still gives us a little pause as 
we try to make up our minds about the fate of the things 
in themselves. Whether you accept Kant 's view of the self 
or not, there can be no doubt that his practical teaching 
concerning that self which I am to view as the author of 
my own deeds has its own special interest. The fact that 
no psychological analysis ever discovers the first origin 
of any mental phenomenon whatever, while I yet have a 
deep and morally significant tendency to ascribe to my- 
self an originative character as the source of my own 

42 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
deeds — all this, I say, furnishes a motive for speaking of 
the true self as no phenomenon, and as at once beyond 
and beneath all my present consciousness. This motive 
the principal post-Kantian idealists, as we shall soon see, 
fully appreciated. It suggests rather a modification than 
a simple dropping of the conception of things in them- 
selves. What such a modification might involve is further 
suggested by an aspect of phenomena which both Kant 
and common sense recognize, and which was pointed out 
in our previous lecture when we were sketching Kant's 
deduction. 

We deal with the phenomenal world, and the laws 
of our own intelligence determine the outline struc- 
ture which its facts must possess in case they are to take 
any place at all in our sciences or in our lives. But as 
we saw, this outline structure is not its own filling. The 
form of things, according to Kant, we know a priori, but 
the form does not, to our view, determine the matter. In 
other words, we are conscious of phenomena ; and, ac- 
cording to Kant, we can become conscious a priori of the 
types of law which phenomena must exemplify. We are 
not conscious of the source of our experience. We are 
not conscious of why just these facts must be presented 
to our senses. We have passively to await the verdict of 
experience regarding what data are to fill out our intel- 
ligent outline plan of things. 

This being the case, it is natural to say that since phe- 
nomena, although, in Kant's view, objective, are still 
facts for a possible human consciousness, while human 
consciousness is an expression of the self, therefore the 
source of our experience may lie hidden in that very 
nature of the real self which Kant, in his ethics, postu- 
lates as the source of our deeds. The true self is hidden 

43 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
from us. It is no phenomenon. Yet it is that which actu- 
ally does our deeds. May it not in some way originate 
our experience also? May not its hidden nature be re- 
sponsible for the matter of experience as well as for the 
form ? May not the self be the only true thing in itself ? 
May not sense and understanding both spring from a 
common to us unknown root ? In a famous passage Kant 
himself had suggested, in a purely problematic sense, 
this very possibility. The early post-Kantian idealists 
agreed in an endeavor to frame such an hypothesis, 
and so far as might be, to develop and to verify it. 

Things in themselves seemed to us, a moment since, 
useless, because only phenomena are definable in terms 
of human knowledge. Now we see two motives that might 
tend to modify this general verdict. The first motive is 
furnished by the self. In the case of the self there exists a 
problematic union of observable mental phenomena with 
a practically significant assertion of its own ethical sig- 
nificance on the part of the self — a problematic union of 
"I seem to be thus or thus in my mental state' ' with 
"I will do this or this." This union of the phenomenal 
and the significant, of the mere sequence of states and the 
originative will, suggests that we are deeper than we seem 
to be. We are more than merely phenomenal. The second 
motive lies in the fact that while the phenomena, al- 
though objective, are still our own experience, and thus 
partake of the nature of the self, they still seem such 
that we are not now conscious why they belong to the 
self. We are not now conscious why we experience what 
we do experience. This suggests the possibility that the 
experience of the self has, like our own deeds, a source 
in the now hidden nature of the self. 

Both these motives proved potent with the post-Kant- 

44 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
ian idealism. How potent, and with how reasonable a 
result, we shall later see. 

IV. 
We have now seen one instability of Kant's view re- 
garding knowledge, and have denned one tendency that 
led later thinkers to modify his view. Herewith the case 
for a modification of Kant's views is not closed. Kant 
undertook to define with precision the a priori forms in 
terms of which our intelligence finds its own in the phe- 
nomena. The question very naturally arises: How did 
he find out what these forms are? His list of them is 
made up, indeed, of familiar names: time, space, the 
four types of categories, that is, quantity, quality, re- 
lation, modality — all of them terms which either com- 
mon usage or the technical language of the traditional 
logic had long since made known. Kant used these 
and certain other terms to define a supposedly exhaus- 
tive list of the forms which, according to him, our intel- 
ligence imposes a priori upon all phenomena. But the 
very fact that Kant especially emphasized the exhaus- 
tive character of this list, readily aroused the question : 
What kind of knowledge can we possess which enables 
us to be sure that just these and no others are the a priori 
forms? The natural answer to this question would be: 
We know these forms because they are characteristic 
of the human self. Since this is our own self, we can 
be sure of its forms by simply reflecting upon its na- 
ture. But this answer at once arouses a retort. The 
self, as we have just seen, is, in some respects, a very 
mysterious being. Yet Kant knows it well enough to be 
sure what are the necessary a priori forms of its intel- 
ligence. If one turns back to his deduction of the cate- 
gories to see just what, if you admit the cogency of 

45 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

his main argument, he may be said to have proved 
in that discussion, then at best his argument seems to 
be that the objects of our experience must conform to 
whatever types of structure are in fact essential to the 
working of our human intelligence. This result may be 
fully admitted, and yet the possibility remains that in 
our imperfect reflections, we might be led to view as es- 
sential to the possibility of intelligent experience cer- 
tain forms of conceptual structure which really are 
not essential, but which happen to be due merely to our 
present habits of mind. Thus, one who speaks English, 
and who thinks in English, has his ways of conceiving 
the structure of things considerably modified by the 
habits of English speech. In fact, Aristotle's table of 
categories was much influenced by considerations that 
were largely of a grammatical rather than of as deep a 
metaphysical significance as he himself supposed. In any 
case, such considerations as those which are mainly sug- 
gested by English or by Greek linguistic usage are not 
essential to the structure of the intelligence. Phenomena 
need not, as it were, speak to us in English nor yet in 
Greek forms, in order to be understood. A genuinely 
stable, a truly fundamental, system of categories, must 
therefore be founded upon considerations that are inde- 
pendent of language, or of any other changeable acci- 
dents of the development of human intelligence. Now 
one may well ask whether Kant has secured, by any ar- 
ticulate procedure, that his table of categories shall con- 
tain the forms really necessary to our understanding of 
facts, and no other — forms not accidental, merely lin- 
guistic, or otherwise conventional. If, in order to test 
this issue, we ask whence Kant derived his list of the 
necessary forms of the intelligence, the answer is that 

46 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
he derived his view of the forms of our sensibility, i.e., 
time and space, from a study of the logic of geometry 
as he understood that logic, while he obtained his table 
of the categories of the understanding in a somewhat 
more superficial way, viz., from a consideration of the 
traditional classification of judgments that the textbooks 
of formal logic contained. In any case, his list of the 
forms essential to our intelligence looks rather empir- 
ical. He gives us no reason why just these forms and no 
others must result from the very nature of a self such 
as ours. No one principle seems to define the whole list. 
His forms appear in his account without any statement 
of their genesis and with no acceptable discussion of the 
reasons for holding his list to be exhaustive. And his 
statement that since these are our own forms we must 
be able to know what they are, seems inconsistent with 
his equally express admission that the true nature of the 
self is unknown to us. 

It seems impossible, then, to accept the main princi- 
ples of Kant's deduction of the categories without at 
once proceeding to supplement that deduction. One can- 
not hope to know so much about the nature of the hu- 
man intelligence as Kant wants us to know, without also 
undertaking to know more than he furnishes. If one ac- 
cepts in principle the Kantian deduction, one must 
surely attempt to comprehend the relation of the cate- 
gories to the self ; and one must seek to discover a genu- 
ine unity of principle which may connect the various 
categories with one another, and with the time and space 
forms. This unity of principle, if discoverable at all, 
must result from something which shall prove to be 
knowable about the self and about its relation to ex- 
perience. In substance, Kant's deduction says that the 

47 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
world of phenomena must conform to the type of our in- 
telligence, because, to use a modern phrase previously 
employed, a certain survival of the fittest phenomena 
in the mental process that prepares phenomena to be 
known, must antedate, as it were, our own actual con- 
sciousness of any observable phenomenal facts. "We can 
only know such phenomena as are fit to be known — an 
expression which contains, in fact, Kant's whole deduc- 
tion in a nutshell. Such fitness presupposes an adapta- 
tion of all phenomenal facts to the essential conditions 
that make them intelligible, an adaption to the out- 
line scheme which any such intelligent being as we are 
imposes a priori upon facts. Were facts possible that were 
not thus adapted to the forms of our intelligence, then we 
should never notice such facts as objective phenomena 
at all. They would perish from our experience before 
they were identified, or at best would remain for us mere 
dreams. Now if you accept this Kantian conception of 
the structure of experience as, in general, correct, you 
all the more feel the need to define just what these es- 
sential conditions of intelligibility are, and you need 
also to be sure of the adequacy of your definition. But 
since the essential is that which some principle, some 
reason, distinguishes from the merely accidental, you 
thus demand a supplementary deduction of the catego- 
ries which shall show not merely the necessity of catego- 
ries in general, but why just these categories are required 
by that very principle, whatever it is, upon which the 
entire intelligent life of the self logically depends. Some 
one such principle there must be, from Kant 's own point 
of view, in case there is to be one self at all (instead of 
a mere variety of types of selfhood) characteristic of 
our human nature. 

48 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
To deduce the categories from the nature of the self, 
and in doing so to reduce them all, and if possible, the 
whole of philosophy to a system of results derived from 
a single principle — this undertaking consequently be- 
came, for the post-Kantians, a characteristic ideal. The 
presence of this ideal determines the form of their sys- 
tematic investigations. They do not want merely to de- 
duce in general the applicability of our categories to all 
phenomena. They want to deduce each category in its 
order. They want to show why our intelligence demands, 
by virtue of some one principle of the self, the use of 
specific categories, and how each category determines in 
its place in the whole system, the structure of its own 
class or of its own aspect of facts. 

This investigation, once attempted, almost inevitably 
leads to a much closer relation between the categories 
and the data of experience than Kant had admitted. For 
one thing, time and space, which Kant views as irredu- 
cible forms of our sensibility and as very distinct from 
the categories of the understanding, are in general con- 
sidered, by the post-Kantians, as in principle inseparable 
from, and as definable in, terms of the categories. More- 
over, even the very data of sense themselves, which Kant 
had regarded as an externally given material, could not 
escape from at least an effort, on the part of the later 
philosophy, to view them as also determined by the na- 
ture, although perhaps by the now hidden and uncon- 
scious nature of the self. There existed, therefore, in the 
view of these idealists, the need for a deduction, not in- 
deed of the single data of sense themselves, but, in any 
case, of the reason why such apparently irreducible data 
have to be presented to the self. This deduction, if once 
attempted, would have to employ the same principle from 

49 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
whose unity the variety of the categories was also to be 
deduced. For otherwise philosophy would not attain that 
unity of system which these successors of Kant de- 
manded. To be sure, it is false to imagine that any post- 
Kantian idealist ever undertook to deduce a priori the 
necessity that just this sound or this color or this pain 
should be present at a given moment to your senses. For 
plainly the single fact of sense can not in general be 
predicted except upon the basis of previous data of 
senses. But the effort to define from the very nature of 
the self, why its current experience must seem foreign 
to it, and why its intelligence has to be expressed in the 
form of a conflict with this apparently alien world of 
sense facts — this effort, I say, played no small part in 
the early idealism. Whatever you may think of the re- 
sult, the effort was a natural one, for it was closely as- 
sociated with the motives which, as we have now seen, 
led to the view that things in themselves, beyond the 
self, are mere fictions ; so that we have to deal in philos- 
ophy, on the one hand with the phenomena, and on the 
other with the self, whose phenomena they are. 

V. 

In our sketch of the situation we have now passed in 
review three of the four ideas which, at the outset of 
this lecture, we regarded as summing up the sense of 
the Kantian deduction. The view that we know phenom- 
ena, and not things in themselves, the accompanying as- 
sertion that we know the a priori forms of the intelli- 
gence, the thesis that these forms are imposed a priori 
upon the matter which the senses furnish, while never- 
theless the forms do not, of themselves, predetermine 

50 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
this matter which fills them out — these features of 
Kant's doctrine inevitably led, as we have seen, to new 
reflections, and so to modifications of his theses. The 
things in themselves become of so problematic a nature 
that they come to appear useless furniture of which 
philosophy must rid itself. Or if any such concept is, 
for the idealists, to survive at all, it must survive, as 
would seem, in the shape of whatever is at the heart or 
at the root of the self. The categories require a new de- 
duction, which shall, if possible, connect them with 
time, with space, with one another, and with the self, 
according to some single principle which shall determine 
how the self needs just these forms. The source of the 
very matter of sense itself must be brought, if possible, 
into some relation with the nature of the self, and with 
the single principle just mentioned, in such a manner 
that it may become evident why the self needs, after all, 
to view its own realm of sense facts as an alien realm, 
even in order to win it over, through intelligent articula- 
tion, to some conscious unity with the purpose of the 
reason. In other words, whatever principle is at the basis 
of self-consciousness must, if possible, be shown to be 
also the principle that lies at the basis of the sense world. 
Thus only could Kant's philosophy be rendered satis- 
factory to the very minds which took the warmest in- 
terest in its fashion of analyzing experience. 

The fourth one in our list of the characteristic 
thoughts of Kant's deduction still remains to be con- 
sidered. This was the thought that all our possible ex- 
perience must be viewed as connected and as interre- 
lated, by virtue of the very fact that it is to be defined 
as the experience of one virtual self. This virtual self 
appears to be not merely the intelligent observer, from 

51 



-■ 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

moment to moment, of each passing fact, but also the 
possessor, in some sense, of all facts at once. ' ' There is, ' ' 
said Kant, "but one experience," and all experiences 
are to be viewed as parts of this one experience. Here 
was a thought which Kant had emphasized, but which 
he had also kept, after a fashion very characteristic of 
his own habits of suspended judgment, in a state of de- 
liberately arrested development. 

Whatever possible experience I acknowledge — let us 
say, an experience of the physical state of the interior 
of the earth, or of a remote event in the past history 
of the cosmos — I acknowledge that fact only by placing 
it in the same virtual unity of experience in which my 
present observations have their place. So teaches Kant. 
Thereby he defines, as he believes, that sort and degree 
of objectivity in phenomena which the logic of empirical 
science demands. Knowledge is only of things experi- 
enced. But knowledge is not concerned merely with the 
here and now of experience. Knowledge is concerned 
with the relation of every phenomenon to the whole of 
experience. 

Now who has this whole of experience? Not I, in so 
far as here and now I observe facts. In the whole of ex- 
perience, your experience, and the experiences of Galileo, 
of Newton, of whoever has observed or is yet to observe 
phenomena, have their places. Experience is no private 
affair. It belongs to all human kind. "We share in it as 
we share in a common national existence or in a common 
humanity. The knowing self which is viewed as the one 
subject of experience must at least virtually be viewed as 
the self of mankind, rather than as the transient intelli- 
gent activity of any mortal amongst us. 

52 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
Kant repeatedly, in effect although never in quite as 
express words as I have just used, indicates that we can 
only deal with the objective facts of human science by 
regarding all human experience as if it constituted a sin- 
gle whole. It is, to my mind, equally clear that this unity 
remains for Kant a virtual unity, never anything in 
which he believes as a concrete and conscious mental 
reality. How the mental processes of various men are ul- 
timately and metaphysically related to one another, Kant 
does not know. That remains among the insoluble mys- 
teries of the hidden real nature of things. But when 
we believe any observed physical phenomena to be ob- 
jectively real, we regard our own empirical judgments, 
made regarding such observed facts, as valid for all men. 
A judgment about experience is valid, according to Kant, 
because the conditions which determine the unity of a 
man's consciousness require it to be valid. It must fol- 
low that what we view as the conditions which determine 
our own unity of consciousness we also view as the con- 
ditions which determine the unity of every other man's 
consciousness. Moreover, all the objective empirical facts 
which are valid for any of us, each of us views as bound 
up in a single unity of experience, namely his own unity. 
This single unity must then be virtually the same for all 
men, since any man's objective empirical facts are, if 
rightly denned, valid for every other man. How one can 
thus view this virtual unity as genuine, without con- 
ceiving the intelligent selves of all men as constituting 
the expression of an actually and concretely real self- 
hood, wherein all men share, does not and cannot appear 
from Kant's carefully guarded expressions. This point 
also was one upon which he simply kept his judgment 
suspended. It was natural, therefore, that one of the 

53 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

problems of the later idealism should be the relation of 
the individual human self to the other intelligent human 
selves. 

Herewith we touch upon one, although not upon the 
only motive that strongly influences the later idealists 
to use, in addition to the term self, another term, viz., 
the term Absolute. We have already seen how the con- 
cept of the self, as Kant had denned that term, deepened 
its significance as one reflected upon the manifold offices 
which the self had to fulfil in later philosophy. The 
self is the knower whose categories predetermine the 
form of all phenomena. The self is also the doer whose 
acts have a more than phenomenal meaning. The self 
has, in addition, a nature that, although single and 
united, determines a variety of categories in accordance 
with some unity of principle which philosophy must 
attempt to define. Yet further, the self has a funda- 
mental nature which must, at least in general, determine 
not only the form but in some still hidden sense the 
very matter of experience. But now, above all, this con- 
cept of the self must be so enriched as to become not 
merely individual but social. For we all, not merely any 
one individual alone, are its offspring and its expression. 

To such postulates the post-Kantian idealists were 
led by a process whose logic I have thus endeavored to 
sketch. You may think what you will of their results. It 
is interesting to remark, even at this stage of our inquiry, 
that their most significant subsequent work was related 
to the matter to which we have just alluded. The post- 
Kantian idealism was noteworthy in its analysis of the 
conditions of knowledge. But as we shall find in the se- 
quel, it was still more noteworthy in its development of 
social concepts, and in its decidedly fruitful study of the 

54 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
relations which bind the individual self to that unity of 
selfhood which includes all individuals. 

The idealists have been much ridiculed by their crit- 
ics for their use of the term ' ' The Absolute. ' ' It may in- 
terest us to learn that one of the chief motives for sub- 
stituting the term " Absolute" for the term "self " as the 
name for the principle of philosophy, was interwoven 
with motives furnished by the social consciousness. For 
whatever else the later idealism proved to be, we shall 
find that it included, as one of its most notable parts, a 
social philosophy. And whoever wishes to understand 
modern social doctrines, will do well to take account of 
the contribution to that sort of thinking which was made 
by idealism. 

Note to Lecture II. 

[The editor finds the author's following criticism of 
Kant here pertinent. The passage is from an early un- 
published fragment entitled "Some Characteristics of 
Being."] 

Kant has an ontology. The recognition of the things 
in themselves as obvious presuppositions is, for him, an 
essential part of the doctrine which sets definite limits 
to our knowledge, and which declares the things in them- 
selves unknowable. Nor does the Kantian ontology cease 
with the mere recognition of the things in themselves. 
In various ways these unknowable realities become, as 
it were, inevitably entangled in the fortunes of the world 
of knowledge. And one of the most curious instances of 
this entanglement appears in the Kantian theory of the 
process whereby knowledge itself comes to be consti- 
tuted. 

The definitive form of the critical theory of knowl- 

55 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
edge, as appears from the well-known letter to Herz, had 
its origin in a reflection upon a certain specific ontolog- 
ical situation to which Kant's attention had been at- 
tracted immediately after the discovery of the antino- 
mies, and the consequent abandonment of any reality for 
time and space beyond the knowing mind 's sensuous con- 
stitution had led Kant to feel himself as it were more es- 
tranged from the realm of the noumena. In consequence 
of this sense of estrangement, Kant was led to say : If the 
realities beyond and the understanding within are thus 
essentially, and of course ontologically sundered, as in 
separate realms of being, how is the relation of knowl- 
edge to its object possible at all 1 For Kant at this stage, 
then, as for so many other thinkers, the epistemological 
problem is subordinate to the ontological theory. Knower 
and noumenon are, as beings, apart from one another. 
And it is supposed to be known that this situation is a 
fact. The epistemology does not first prove to the thinker 
this ontological result; rather is the epistemology in- 
vented to meet issues suggested by the ontological pre- 
supposition. "Allein," says Kant, "unser Verstand ist 
durch seine Vorstellungen weder die Ursache des Gegen- 
standes (ausser in der Moral von den guten Zwecken), 
noch der Gegenstand die Ursache der Verstandesvorstel- 
lungen (in sensu reali). Die reinen Verstandesbegriffe 
miissen ... in der Natur der Seele zwar ihre Quellen ha- 
ben, aber doch weder insofern sie vom Object gewirkt 
werden, noch das Object selbst hervorbringen. Ich hatte 
mich in der Dissertation damit begniigt die Natur der 
Intellectual- Vorstellungen bloss negativ auszudriicken : 
dass sie namlich nicht Modificationen der Seele durch 
den Gegenstand waren. Wie aber denn sonst eine Vor- 
stellung, die sich auf einen Gegenstand bezieht, ohne 

56 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
von ihm auf einige Weise afficirt zu sein, moglich, iiber- 
ging ich mit Stillschweigen. " To the question thus 
raised, Kant devoted himself thenceforth during the 
elaboration of his new critical doctrine. 

But if the presupposition of the new epistemology was 
ontological, the further procedure was not less so. Every- 
one knows that complex and in some respects variable 
doctrine of the way in which Verstand, Sinnlichkeit, 
Einbildungskraft, and finally Vernunft, cooperate to 
bring to pass the structure which the critical doctrine 
calls human knowledge, the various grades of "syn- 
thesis," the " hidden' ' operations of the Einbildungs- 
kraft, the list of categories, the perplexing doctrine of 
the Schema. Now the result of all this theory is well 
known — the situation in which it leaves human experi- 
ence, the limitation and the correlated necessities of 
the empirical sciences, the new type of objectivity 
which Kant defines, in his theory of Mogliche Erfah- 
rung — in brief, the whole teaching concerning our cog- 
nitive relations to reality which Kant so significantly 
sets forth as his critical outcome. But many a reader has 
noted, with a perplexity not easily to be satisfied through 
any study of Kant's text, one question which the entire 
discussion raises, but always keeps in the background. 
Such, Kant tells us, is the limitation of knowledge, be- 
cause such is the process by means of which knowledge 
comes to pass. Sense affects, apprehension beholds, sense- 
forms embrace, imagination, toiling as it were in the 
dark, schematizes, categories consequently pervade the 
whole material of experience. There results an ordered 
whole, full of a transcendental affinity of fact and fact, 
a whole centered about the ever possible thought "It is 
I who think thus. ' ' This whole, always more or less ideal, 

57 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
a life-plan, as it were, but never a completed career 
for our understanding, is the realm of experience, a 
fruitful and well-ordered island in the ocean of ontolog- 
ical mysteries. This then is our kingdom of knowledge. 
This it is, because thus it is made. Yes, one asks, but this 
process that makes knowledge, is it a real process, or 
only a seeming process ? Has the process any being of its 
own, or is it only an ideal construction of the philoso- 
pher? The answer must be in one sense obvious enough. 
The process occurs. It is real. Because it has being, and 
true being, the realm of knowledge has such constitution 
as belongs to it, and such limits as Kant defines. But 
once again : Is this type of being which the process pos- 
sesses the noumenal type, or only a phenomenal type? 
Is it only a matter of Mogliche Erfahrung that such a 
process is found to take place? Or does the noumenal 
ego in any sense participate in the process? To this 
question a satisfactory answer seems hard, upon a Kant- 
ian basis, to find. 

If one goes back to the original ontological presupposi- 
tions of the critical theory, one finds the answer to our 
question involving considerations that appear to belong 
largely, if not wholly, to the realm of ultimate or noume- 
nal being. Originally, the problem of the letter to Herz 
ran, as we have seen, thus : It is presupposed that there 
are two beings, or rather two realms of being, the Ge- 
genstdnde proper, and the knowing subject. Now the lat- 
ter, the knowing subject, pretends to be aware of certain 
Verstandesbegriffe which tell him about the Gegenstdnde 
wie sie an sich sind. But the Gegenstdnde do not affect 
the understanding of the knowing subject, and so do not 
directly mould the latter to their own form. How then 
is the knowledge possible ? The critical answer runs that, 

58 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
as a fact, no true knowledge of the Gegenstande an sich is 
possible, since they, unquestionably real as they remain, 
cannot get into the knowing subject's realm of experi- 
ence. As a fact, the knowing subject's realm of knowledge 
is the result of his own nature, which, by virtue of its 
mechanism aforesaid, builds up the structure of experi- 
ence, coherent, and relatively objective, but still inner. 

That the knowing subject, however, has this mechan- 
ism, that his powers do thus build up his experience by 
the application of a priori forms, this would seem to be 
itself an ontological assertion upon the same level as the 
original ontological assertions with which we started. We 
have learned to know that we do not know the Gegen- 
stande an sich, because we have also learned to know 
better than we did one real process whose being is as 
genuine as is that of the original noumena themselves. 
This is the process whereby our own experience gets its 
structure. This process occurs. The constitution of the 
island, and the waves that limit its shores, these are as 
real as are the hidden wonders of the unknown ocean 
beyond. And unless the process whereby the nature and 
limits of knowledge get their constitution thus possesses 
as genuine a being as do the noumena themselves, it 
would apparently be hard to make out in what sense the 
Kantian doctrine of the limitations of knowledge can be 
called a really true doctrine at all. 

This seems to be one answer to our question. But the 
fact seems to be equally clear that many aspects of 
Kant's own theory forbid the acceptance of this answer 
as sufficient from his own point of view. The whole spirit 
of the Kantian deduction of the categories, especially in 
its later forms, tends to set over against this purely onto- 
logical interpretation of the basis of his epistemology, a 

59 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

far more decidedly immanent theory according to which 
the true limitation of knowledge is discovered by a proc- 
ess of internal reflection. This immanent theory, in so 
far as Kant indicates its scope, assumes several fairly 
distinct forms. According to one form, we discover the 
limitations of knowledge by reflecting that science every- 
where uses certain a priori principles, whose necessity 
conditions the very possibility of science, while no mere 
collection of experience could warrant, and no preestab- 
lished harmony of knowledge and of noumenal being 
could adequately establish them. But science is, within 
the realm of human experience, an immanent, but still 
even as such, an unquestionable fact. Hence science must 
be possible. As, from the nature of necessary truth, 
known to us a priori, no commerce with things in them- 
selves could make science possible, the necessity of the 
principles of science must be itself immanent, while of 
things in themselves there can be no science. 

While this fashion of interpreting the basis of Kant's 
theory does not wholly avoid (as what discussion can 
avoid?) existential predicates, it does indeed, as far as 
it goes, tend to free the Kantian epistemology from logi- 
cal dependence upon the original ontology, and tends to 
make Kant's hypotheses as to the processes whereby 
knowledge gets organized, hypotheses whose warrant is 
to be obtained, if at all, either within the field of psy- 
chological experience upon the one hand, or by the aid of 
general epistemological reflection upon the other. The 
only trouble with this aspect of the doctrine is the arbi- 
trariness of the epistemological presupposition that sci- 
ence, with necessary a priori principles, must be possible 
— an assumption which Kant never sufficiently main- 
tains against a possible skepticism. 

60 



KANT'S CONCEPTION OF THE SELF 
Kant makes, however, yet other efforts to set his epis- 
temology upon an independent basis. The efforts grouped 
about the central idea of the Transcendental Unity of 
Apperception are the deepest. But into these we cannot 
here go. Suffice it to say that upon this side Kant goes 
far to break the ontological chains in which he had first 
bound himself. Yet his theory, as he expounds it, never 
fully attains the freedom at which Kant unconsciously 
aimed. To the end it remains true that, as Kant states his 
case, his theory of knowledge generally is made to appear 
dependent upon an assertion that the processes whereby 
knowledge is formed are real facts in the realm of 
being, a being that might as well be called as genuine 
as are the very noumena from whose presence Kant 
intends to banish us altogether. 

In so far, however, as this is the case, Kant also is 
condemned to his own decidedly disheartening form of 
our process of circular proof and of circular definition, 
so far as relates to his ontology. For if his theory of 
knowledge is dependent upon his assumption of the exist- 
ence of a certain ontological situation, it is true that 
Kant's theory, once accepted, forbids us to define any 
ontological situation whatever except as purely prob- 
lematic accounts of what can have for us no Bedeutung, 
no true meaning whatever. In Kant's case then the circle 
is that, in order to reach his epistemology, as he usually 
states the latter, one has to accept his ontology, while 
after one has once accepted the epistemology, anything 
but a wholly problematic ontology is excluded. Or again, 
in Kant's case, one defines true or noumenal being as 
that which cannot be known because such and such is 
the structure of knowledge, while one argues that this 
account of the structure of knowledge is true, partly at 

61 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
least because one has first assumed that such and such a 
real process, a process as real as the noumenal being 
itself from which one started, is taking place, and is 
limiting knowledge to this or to that field. 



LECTURE III. 

THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE AND 
THE DIALECTICAL METHOD. 

MY former lecture was devoted to a general study 
of the transition from Kant's view of the self 
to that deeper but more problematic conception 
of the self which characterized the later idealism. Be- 
fore characterizing further that conception, let me first 
remind you of some of the external conditions under 
which the German philosophical thinking of the time 
now in question took place. 



Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason in 1871. 
The next ten years were marked by the first reception of 
that book in Germany, by the earliest efforts to under- 
stand, to expound, to criticize, and to supplement Kant's 
doctrines, and also by the appearance of the most impor- 
tant of Kant's own further expositions of his principal 
philosophical teaching. In 1792 the literary career of 
Fichte began; and in 1794 that philosopher published 
the first statement of his own form of idealism, in his 
Wissenschaftslehre. Almost at the same moment the 
young Schelling set out upon his career of rapid, bril- 
liant, and changeful expressions of doctrine. In the last 
year of the century, Hegel's professional career as a 
teacher of philosophy began, when he went as Privat- 
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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
Docent to Jena; and his own characteristic teachings 
received their first extended formulation in his Phae- 
nomenologie des Geistes, published in 1807. All these 
works were, at the moment, but single examples of a very 
large philosophical literature which Germany was pro- 
ducing in those years. 

We are here concerned with the beginnings of ideal- 
ism. It requires only a moment's reflection upon the 
great historical events that were contemporary with this 
remarkable outburst of philosophical activity, to remind 
us what manner of time that was. In a general sketch of 
the philosophical situation of those years, I have indi- 
cated, in my Spirit of Modern Philosophy, some of the 
relations of the philosophical to the literary movement of 
that period in Germany, and I have also endeavored in 
that book to characterize some of the personalities who 
were concerned in both movements. It is not my purpose 
to repeat here in any detail these more popular aspects 
of the early history of idealism. But I do not wish you 
to lose sight of the fact that the abstract thinking whose 
fortunes we are trying to portray, was inevitably, and 
quite normally, a reflection of the tendencies and of the 
problems of the civilization of just that age. I beg you 
to keep this fact in mind as you follow these lectures, 
whenever the problems and the theories of the philoso- 
phers seem to you, for the moment, hopelessly remote 
and unreal. Philosophy and life were then in far closer 
touch than, as I fear, they are today in the minds of 
many people. All this technical speech of categories and 
of knowledge, of phenomena and of the self, of the indi- 
vidual and of the Absolute — all this speech, I say, was 
rendered vital to the philosophically disposed readers of 
that time by the fact that, to their minds, it bore upon the 

64 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
very life problems which the Revolution and the new 
social ideals and the passions of the romantic movement 
made so prominent. 

Kant's first Critique had won so wide a public hearing 
in Germany, in the eighties of the eighteenth century, 
largely because of the emphasis which its happily chosen 
title put upon the interests of the human reason. The 
word reason was to the age that immediately antedated 
the French Revolution very much what the word evolu- 
tion has been to our own generation — a sort of general 
comforter of all those who felt puzzled and longed for 
light. Whatever the issue, the enlightened souls of that 
time said, ''Reason will set us right." Reason was to be 
the all-powerful substitute for religion, tradition, super- 
stition, authority, custom, prejudice, oppression, in brief 
for whatever man happened to view as a galling harness. 
Reason was to be a chain breaker, jail deliverer, world 
reformer. Thus, when Kant undertook in his Critique 
an exhaustive survey of the province, the powers, and 
the limits of the reason, he had in his favor not merely 
technical but also deep-seated popular interests. So he 
won a well-deserved attention. 

The results of Kant's Critique seemed to many disap- 
pointingly negative. But then, that was an age of great 
destructions. When the Revolution came, many institu- 
tions which had long seemed to be things in themselves, 
showed that they were nothing but phenomena. And 
when new constitutions and new social orders had to be 
planned, the spirit of the age emphasized the fact that, 
at least in the social world, it is the office of the human 
intelligence to impose its own forms upon the phenomena, 
and to accept no authority but that of the rational self. 
So in that day the spirit of the Kantian philosophy 

65 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

reflected, in a very practical sense, the tendencies of the 
age. The destructive as well as the constructive features 
of this new philosophy were in harmony with that re- 
forming spirit in consequence of which the word rea- 
son at length became, as the Revolutionary ideals 
matured, not a mere name, but a term for a great regu- 
lative force, whose value lay no longer in its vaguely 
abstract authority but in its creative power, in its capac- 
ity to mould plastic phenomena into conformity with its 
forms. 

The transition from Kant's philosophy to the later 
idealism was again a reflection of the spirit which de- 
termined the course of contemporary social events. 
Three features marked the mental life in Germany dur- 
ing the decades with which the eighteenth century 
closed and the nineteenth century opened, say from 
1770 to 1805. The first feature was the great development 
of actual productive power in scholarship, in literature, 
in imaginative work generally, and the accompanying 
increase in the popular respect for great individuals. 
This tendency is visible from 1770 until the close of the 
old century. The second feature was that deepening of 
sentiment, that enrichment of emotional life, which char- 
acterized first the storm and stress period, and later 
both the classical and the romantic literatures of Ger- 
many in those decades. The third feature was that rela- 
tive indifference to mere political fortunes, that spirit 
of world-citizenship, that fondness for what Jean Paul 
called "the empire of the air," which by the close of 
the old century became so characteristic of the most 
representative Germans at the very time when, as the 
Napoleonic period began, the national unity and even 
the political existence of Germany seemed to be hope- 

66 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 

lessly lost. These three features of German mental life 
had a close connection with the great social movements 
of that period. The spirit of the revolutionary age, even 
before 1789, had set free the great individuals. The 
intense social activities of Europe after the political rev- 
olution began, found their expression, in Germany, not 
indeed for the time in effective political reconstructions, 
but rather in the form of a vast increase both of scholarly 
and of imaginatively creative mental life. Meanwhile this 
age of great experiences not unnaturally became also an 
age of great romantic emotions, in which Germany, by 
virtue of the temperament of her people, led the way. 
And at a period when political and military successes 
proved to be impossible for the divided Germany as it 
then was, the representative leaders of German public 
opinion preserved their spiritual independence, protected 
their individuality by deliberately ignoring, or else by 
defying political fortunes, in brief by aiming to show 
their moral superiority to the external mishaps of their 
country. This was the age and the land for a somewhat 
unpractical and fantastical idealism. It was also the 
land and the age for really great thoughts, whose influ- 
ence in later times and in other forms will be permanent. 
Two topics were thus rendered especially prominent in 
the minds of representative German thinkers, whether 
they were technical philosophers or not. The first was 
the self, not merely what we now call the empirical ego 
of psychology, but the significant self, the hero of the 
storm and stress literature of the seventies and eighties, 
and of the romantic emotions of later literary art, the 
sovereign of the new spiritual order — the self that could 
rise above fortune and win without external aid. The 
second was what one may call, in a well-known sense, 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
the invisible world in which the self is immersed — the 
realm into which Goethe's Faust seeks to penetrate at 
the outset of the poem — the region, namely, of ideal 
truths, of truths which you do not so much discover 
through observing either physical or political facts, as 
by investigating moral and aesthetic truth, and by con- 
sulting what you may at first imagine to be magic powers. 
So far as the self was prominent in the minds of the 
Germans of that time, the tendencies of the age were 
towards a somewhat romantic type of individualism. 
Goethe's Faust in its earliest form, Schiller's early 
dramas, Goethe's Prometheus, Friederich Schlegel's ro- 
mantic irony, Fichte 's popular work called the Vocation 
of Man — these are representative expressions of the 
various sorts of individualism to which this period sooner 
or later gave birth. Such individualism was seldom of the 
type which Nietzsche has in our own days emphasized. 
The well-known doctrine of Nietzsche is that of an indi- 
vidual equally merciless to himself and to others. It is 
a restlessly intolerant and muscular individualism which 
despises its own sufferings, an idealism without any ideal 
world of truth, a religion without a faith, a martyrdom 
without prospect of a paradise. But this individualism 
of the storm and stress, of the classical and of the ro- 
mantic periods of German literature was always, in the 
first instance, an emotional rather than what one might 
call a motor individualism ; and it had great faith in its 
own discoveries of ideal truths. Its excesses were much 
more sentimental than are those of Nietzsche, and it 
usually had a religious faith, unorthodox but glowing. 
It might be rebellious ; it might even undertake, in ideal 
forms, world-destroying revolutionary enterprises. But 
it never really despised its own affairs of the heart, as 

68 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
Nietzsche proudly despises his own emotional illusions. 
On the contrary, the individualism of that time always 
sought great heart experiences, and generally believed 
in them, whereas, in our day, individualism loves to as- 
sume a more drastic and contemptuous tone, where the 
interests of the heart are concerned. When German indi- 
vidualism, in those romantic old days, was philosophical 
and reflective, it might be highly critical; but it was 
withal, in the end, either fantastically or even laboriously 
constructive, rather than mainly iconoclastic, whereas 
our extreme individualists are fond of making, as it were, 
pyramids of the skulls of their enemies. Individualism 
is indeed always strongly negative, but the individualism 
of that time had its hearty positive enthusiasms, and 
often hugged its very illusions. It destroyed, but it was 
fond also of building its own temples, which were often 
indeed rather too much in the air. 

As for the other topic of that time, the ideal world, 
that of course has often attracted the eager interest of 
the cultivated minds of mankind. The ideal world for the 
German thinkers of those days differed from that of 
Plato, as well as from that of mediaeval tradition. This 
new realm of the ideal was first of all a region where 
great ethical interests were prominent, but these interests 
had modern forms, determined by the social struggles 
of the age. Freedom, the ideal social order of modern 
society, the ideals of beauty suggested by the newer 
romantic poetry — these were among the notable prob- 
lems of this time. So far as one went beyond the in- 
dividual, the mysterious linkage of the self to other 
selves and to the whole universe of being, formed the 
central problem of philosophy. The religious views of the 
time meanwhile became altered; and instead of the God 

69 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
of traditional theology, and also instead of the world- 
contriving and utilitarian divine being of the earlier 
eighteenth century deism, one now sought for the Abso- 
lute — a being characterized in that time by two princi- 
pal attributes: first, that the Absolute was impersonal 
and thus relatively pantheistic in type ; while, secondly, 
the self was nevertheless the best image and revelation, 
the true incarnation, of this Absolute. This paradox, 
that the self was the center of the universe, while the Ab- 
solute was nevertheless impersonal, formed the crucial 
issue of the time. 

II. 

I am thus led from this general sketch of the state of 
German mental life in the years in question, back to the 
properly philosophical field. 

The early idealists, then, made the problems of phi- 
losophy center about two principal conceptions, that of 
the self and that of the Absolute. We have seen how 
these thinkers, in so far as they were guided by their 
technical interests, came by the first of these problems. 
The Kantian deduction of the categories had given this 
problem of the self its new form, and had done so by 
emphasizing the fact that all phenomena (and phenom- 
ena, alone, according to Kant, are knowable) are inev- 
itably moulded in their form by the conditions which are 
imposed upon them by the self in order that they may 
become known to this self. As soon, however, as thinkers 
had undertaken to look closer into Kant's problem, to 
see why the self has these categories, and no others, 
and to understand how the self imposes these categories 
upon the data of sense, it had become obvious that 
Kant's account of the matter was incomplete. The self 
remained even for Kant a problem. Kant 's own emphasis, 

70 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 

in his later writings, upon the ethical aspects of the self, 
still further made it necessary to understand where the 
basis and the true unity of self-consciousness lies. And 
when the philosophers further attacked this problem of 
the self, their interest was intensified by the whole spirit 
of an age which, as we have now seen, believed in the 
self, believed in individuality, gloried in the inner life. 
We have now also seen why the other problem — the 
problem of the Absolute — was almost equally emphasized 
by the interests of that day. Whatever the true self is, 
its nature is hidden, at least from our ordinary knowl- 
edge, in the depths of unconsciousness. Only when we 
learn to reflect can we hope to penetrate any of its deeper 
mysteries. But when we reflect, we at once bring to light 
a new question, the question of the relations between the 
practical and the theoretical life of the self. The two 
expressions of self -consciousness, "I know/* and "I 
do," stand, in Kant's account, in a profoundly baffling 
relation. The unity can here be found only through some 
principle which Kant left still undiscovered. Closely con- 
nected with this problem is another which Kant indeed 
touches but only to leave it for his successors to develop. 
This problem is furnished by the relations amongst the 
many selves. That they possess a common nature, is 
implied in every step of Kant's discussion of the human 
intellect. How this common nature is to be further 
defined, this matter Kant treats with a careful reticence. 
What indications he gives are paradoxically baffling. 
Kant's ideal moral world of rational agents — the object 
of what he defines as our well-warranted faith — is a 
realm of ethical autonomy, a kingdom of free selves, a 
distinctly pluralistic community, as Professor Howison 
has, with historical accuracy, insisted. The virtual self 

71 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
of the deduction of the categories, however, is a princi- 
ple whose unity determines the mutual relations of all 
possible human experiences, and whose universality- 
defines the sense in which empirical judgments are valid 
for all men. If you give to this principle any further 
definition than Kant had given it, the unity of this true 
ego invites a monistic formulation. Kant has no reason 
to decide between such a monism and his ethical plural- 
ism. The one is a concept of his theory of knowledge, the 
other of his ethics. And ultimate truth we cannot know. 
His judgment in these matters is theoretically suspended. 
But for his idealistic successors such deliberate suspen- 
sion of judgment proved impossible. We thus begin to 
see why, in view of the conflict between the unity of the 
world of truth and the pluralism of the world of action, 
these idealists were led to seek a solution in terms of the 
conception of an impersonal Absolute, which is never- 
theless the ground and the source of personality. 

It would of course be inaccurate to ascribe to the 
concept of the Absolute as these men formed it the sole 
office of accounting for the relations of various selves. 
Unquestionably the magnitude of the social movements 
of those times, the vast changes of civilization that were 
then under way, the elemental passions that were then 
set free, the sense of an overwhelming fate, predeter- 
mining human affairs — all these things influenced the 
philosophers in their conception of the Absolute. In 
sharp contrast to the individualism of the revolution- 
ary period, stood the fact of the blind power of the mob, 
which the Revolution had for a while so impressively 
demonstrated. The general awakening of the peoples, 
viewed as great masses, was as notable a fact of the age 
as was the importance of the heroes of the day. Napoleon, 

72 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
when he came, seemed to his admirers less a mere individ- 
ual than the incarnation of some demonic spirit of a 
whole nation's life. The hackneyed story relates how 
Hegel, who one day saw Napoleon for a moment after the 
battle of Jena, said that he had met the Weltgeist zu 
Pferde. In those days, one could not long remain merely 
individualistic. The self was prominent; but the uni- 
verse was impressing upon the beholder, in a new way, 
its possession of vast impersonal forces which used indi- 
viduals as their mere tools. In the light of such experi- 
ences men began to read the philosophy of history in a 
new way. 

Nevertheless, something more than the social and his- 
torical problems impelled thinkers towards an interpreta- 
tion of the world in terms of an Absolute. Kant's theory 
was, within its carefully guarded limits, a doctrine 
regarding the bases of our empirical knowledge of phe- 
nomena. It was no theory of nature. Our understanding 
determines forms; it cannot predetermine the material 
that shall fill these forms. Hence nature remains to us a 
mystery. We can never deduce a single concrete fact. 
"Why, for instance, organisms exist in nature with the 
appearance of having been designed, we can never hope 
to fathom through our understanding. Kant once more 
resolutely suspends his judgments. We can understand 
the order of phenomena ; we can never pierce to the heart 
of things and find why they exist. 

The idealists could not accept this Kantian limitation. 
Once they had disposed of Kant's shadowy and unknow- 
able things in themselves, the problem of the world 
became for them, as we have seen, one about the true 
nature of the self. This problem, however, sent them far 
beneath the threshold of our ordinary consciousness. 

73 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
Whatever it is that determines the experience of the self, 
must also determine not only all of the forms and the 
relations of the many selves but also the true basis of 
all the phenomena that appear to us as physical nature. 
Grant that the physical world is a phenomenon, our 
phenomenon. Then it is our own deeper nature which 
determines this phenomenon to appear thus foreign to 
us, and ourselves to seem as if we were mere products 
of its mechanism. All experience is appearance for the 
self. Well then, we must be able, if we reflect rightly, to 
discover, not indeed the reason for every detail of the 
world, but at least the general reasons why our experi- 
ence presents to us here the organic and there the inor- 
ganic type of phenomena, here the growth of things, 
and there their decay. We must be able to learn why it is, 
and in what sense, that the individual man appears and 
must appear to us as a phenomenon amongst phenomena, 
as a product of nature — in brief, why man, who bears 
about in his own inmost core the very secret of the uni- 
verse of phenomena, still seems, and has to seem, as if he 
were the mere creature of a day, whom a mere wound 
can destroy, whom a pestilence can slay. In sum then, 
this philosophy must undertake to be a philosophy of 
nature, and to discuss, not merely the forms of things, 
but their presentation, source, and meaning. 

I suggest thus in outline certain of the main thoughts 
of this philosophical movement, attempting at this point 
neither criticism nor defense of these thoughts. They 
were at least a natural product of the situation. And one 
sees why a philosophy which was equally to explain our 
own inner as well as the basis of our experience of outer 
nature, was readily disposed to attempt to unify its 
notions by means of an impersonal conception of the 

74 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
Absolute, a conception still to be kept in the closest 
touch with the conception of the true meaning of the 
self. 

In addition to the problems of the self, of the many- 
selves, and of nature, the philosophy of this time was 
deeply moved by the new form which the problems of 
religion had inevitably received in consequence of the 
spirit of the age. Individualism had broken with theolog- 
ical authority. The eighteenth century worship of rea- 
son had long since rendered rationalism in theology a 
favorite philosophical ideal. The Kantian philosophy, in 
relegating religion to the position of an indemonstrable 
ideal, to be purified into a simply rational faith in God, 
freedom, and immortality, had only the more set free 
the tendency to reconstruct the contents of tradition in 
accordance with the spirit of the time. The new concep- 
tion of the Absolute was thus inevitably developed under 
the influence of a predisposition in favor of a new the- 
ology. There is a profoundly religious motive which, both 
in Hindoo and in Western thought, has for thousands of 
years underlain the view that one comes into closest touch 
with the Divine, not without but within one's own true 
self. The Hindoo seers and the Christian mystics had 
agreed in seeking an unity of the self and of the Divine 
wherein the nature of each is intimately revealed at the 
moment when they are nearest together. The new ideal- 
ism revived these ancient thoughts but gave them its own 
form. What is at the heart, at the root, at the ground of 
the self, must be, in terms of the philosophy of which 
Kant's doctrine had given such novel forms, the Abso- 
lute, the common root and ground of all selfhood, and of 
all nature. This then, so these thinkers hold, will be what 
the ancient faith has meant by the name "God." Only 

75 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
the new philosophy will be no merely mystical experi- 
ence. It will be a well-wrought and systematic doctrine, 
with a method of its own. A revised and completed deduc- 
tion of the categories shall render the new formula- 
tion of religious faith compatible with reason. The tri- 
umph of the new age shall thus be the union of the 
"form" of a new rationalism with the "matter" of 
ancient mysticism. Such, I say, is in general the ideal of 
the religious philosophy to which this time gave birth. 

III. 

You have now before you a few of the fundamental 
ideas of the philosophy of this period. We must next 
suggest something regarding the method of thinking 
which became characteristic of this philosophy. Concern- 
ing this method a great deal of misunderstanding exists 
amongst those who are not acquainted with the matter at 
first hand. These Germans, one says, attempted to evolve 
all things out of their inner consciousness. So much, and 
no more, does one, only too frequently, know about what 
went on in the procedure of the early idealistic meta- 
physicians. Those who thus sum up the whole matter are 
accustomed to conceive our idealists merely as imagina- 
tive persons who fancied whatever they pleased, and who 
then hid from themselves and their pupils the arbitrari- 
ness of their opinions by means of much unintelligible 
phraseology. The one amongst the greater early idealists 
who gave most ground for such an opinion was Schell- 
ing, a genius, but in his youth an unprincipled and 
voluble genius, who began to write with enormous rapid- 
ity when he was twenty, and who had reached the cul- 
mination of his most productive period, and of his influ- 
ence, before he had well passed thirty years of age. No 

76 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
doubt Sehelling at his worst is indeed an arbitrarily- 
imaginative person ; his early won fame intoxicated him, 
he lacked due self-criticism, and he did not take the 
trouble properly to digest his large store of information 
concerning the current physical science of his day, while 
he nevertheless attempted to use this information for the 
purpose of constructing a new Philosophy of Nature. 
The result is that he wrote much upon this topic which 
remains both fruitless and unreadable. Yet even in the 
course of such hasty work, Sehelling often showed a fine 
instinct for essentially important leading ideas such as 
the science of his day was beginning to develop. Some 
few of his own leading ideas in regard to nature are 
of decidedly more importance than the first glance 
indicates.* 

However, it is no part of my task at this moment to 
discriminate at all exhaustively between the good and 
the bad in the methods of thinking used here or there by 
Sehelling or by any other of the thinkers of the time. 
What is here needed is a broad outline of the most novel, 
most characteristic, and least arbitrary of the methods 
which these philosophers gradually developed. This was 
the so-called dialectical or antithetical method. It meant 
much more than any purely arbitrary use of the construc- 
tive imagination. It did not consist of anything that can 
be fairly described as an evolving of the facts out of 
one's inner consciousness, in so far as that phrase sug- 
gests mere fancifulness. This method, on the contrary, 
had a certain very marked exactness of its own. Used 
within due limits it will always remain a valuable in- 

* Cf . the author 's ' * Eelations between Philosophy and Science 
in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century." Scienoe, N. S., 
XXXVIII, 1913, pp. 567-584.— Ed. 

77 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
strument of philosophical thought. Let me try to indi- 
cate at this point the nature of this dialectical method. 

Historically speaking, this method is derived from 
Socrates, and elaborated in the Platonic dialogues, 
especially in the Parmenides, and to some extent in the 
Sophist, in the Phcedo, in the Thecetetus, in the Phce- 
drus and elsewhere. As Plato used it, it often consists in 
developing and then comparing antithetical, i.e., mu- 
tually contradictory, doctrines, partly for the sake of 
leading the way, through natural, or perhaps inevitable, 
preliminary errors, to some truth which lies beyond 
them, and partly for the sake of exhibiting a complex 
truth in its various aspects, by looking at it first from 
one side and then from another in order finally to win 
a combined view of the whole. Thus, in the Theatetus, 
the Socrates of the dialogue aims towards the goal of a 
sound definition of knowledge — a goal which is indeed 
not reached in the dialogue — by first setting aside, 
through an elaborate dialectical process, the natural pre- 
liminary error of defining knowledge as sense impres- 
sion. In the introduction to the Republic, false views of 
the nature of justice are expounded in order to clear 
the way for the true definition. On the other hand, in 
the Phcedrus two views of nature and the effects of 
love are set in antithesis in order even thereby to depict 
the truth which justifies both views. This truth is that 
there is a conflict in the human soul of the two na- 
tures, the lower and the higher, and that hereby our 
mortal lives and our future destinies are determined. 
Love is a soul- destroying madness. Love is also a god- 
like passion, a divine madness, whereby we learn our 
true destiny. The conflict between these two theses is 
depicted, in this dialogue, as simply the abstract expres- 

78 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
sion of the moral conflict of life, the warfare of the 
spirit with the flesh. 

In addition to such more formal opposition of thesis 
and antithesis, the dialectical process plays, in Socratic 
dialogues, the general part of moving principle of the 
whole discussion. Through a constant self-analysis of its 
own defects, our thinking is led to what often appears 
in the dialogues to be its only possible mode of self-ex- 
pression. Without erring, and transcending our error, 
we, as sometimes suggested by the Socratic irony, simply 
cannot become wise. Such is human wisdom ; namely the 
self-consciousness that observes one's own forms of un- 
wisdom. Without such self-consciousness, one remains 
blind in one 's own conceit. Yet to get it, one must err and 
then rise above the error. 

The thought thus somewhat dimly indicated by vari- 
ous Socratic expressions in the Platonic dialogues — the 
thought that error is not a mere accident of an untrained 
intellect, but a necessary stage or feature or moment of 
the expression of the truth as it is in itself — this 
thought is the very one which the idealists of our period 
not merely admit, but consciously emphasize, and de- 
velop in new forms. Without the Platonic dialogues this 
dialectical method would indeed never have existed. But 
one cannot say that our idealists merely took over the 
old method and applied it to new problems. On the con- 
trary, in the end they so revised it as to lead them to 
the thesis that philosophical truth is, as they gradually 
came to say, essentially dialectical, i.e., you cannot ex- 
press the highest insights except in the form of a series 
of antitheses. Although, as I have suggested, the Platonic 
dialogues contain indications of such a tendency, Plato 's 
own conception of ultimate truth tends to make the dia- 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
lectical process appear rather an incident of our human 
life than a necessity of the truth as it exists in the pure 
realm of the Ideas themselves. Such evidences as Plato 
emphasizes for the thesis that the Ideas themselves are 
the result of a dialectical process, remain undeveloped. 
These idealists, however, devote a great deal of space to 
making the dialectical aspect of truth very explicit. 

The new form of the dialectical method was also due, 
in part, to Kant's famous doctrine of the antinomies. 
Kant undertook to show that the human reason becomes 
involved in conflicts whenever it attempts to discuss the 
beginning of the world in time, the limits of the world 
in space, the ultimate divisibility or non-divisibility of 
matter, the possibility of the free initiation of a series 
of causes and effects, or the existence of a necessary 
being. Thus one can demonstrate, with equal cogency, 
that if the real world is in time at all, it must have had 
a beginning, yet cannot have had a beginning. If the 
real world is in space, it must be limited, and with equal 
cogency can be proved to be unlimited ; and so on. Kant 
states these antinomies and the argument for both theses 
and antitheses and then shows that the solution depends 
upon distinguishing between the world of things in 
themselves and the world of phenomena. Kant's solu- 
tion need not here further concern us. We know that it 
could not content our idealists, who did not admit the 
validity of the Kantian distinction here in question. But 
the fact that Kant declared the appearance of these an- 
titheses to be essential to the very life of the human 
reason, so that the reason, according to him, always ex- 
presses itself in these antithetical demands upon our 
conceptual powers, was of more importance for the ideal- 
ists. For them the question consequently tends to take 

80 



THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
this form : Whatever the solution of any antinomy, why 
do such antinomies, real or apparent, arise in our minds 
at all ? Why do we not come at the truth directly, or else, 
if ignorance besets us, why do we not become directly, 
or through our mere failures to get light, conscious of 
our ignorance? Why are there regions of our thinking 
where conflicting judgments appear to us to possess an 
equally cogent evidence, so that it is to us as if both a 
thesis and an antithesis were positively true? 

No one could be interested in such a question unless 
he had cases of apparently dialectical or antithetical 
thinking prominently before his mind, and unless such 
instances seemed to him no results of merely accidental 
or easily avoidable blunders. The idealists actually be- 
lieved themselves to be in possession of such notable 
cases. Moreover they came to regard such cases as char- 
acteristic of philosophical thought, and, in fact, of phil- 
osophical truth. Still holding ourselves free from any 
prejudgment of the merits of this view of philosophical 
truth, let us now endeavor merely to illustrate some of 
the forms of the dialectical method. 

For the first class of illustrations one may again turn 
to the problems which the spirit of that time furnished 
to the idealists. Whatever else the age of the Revolution 
and the following Napoleonic period were, they were 
such as to suggest that the dialectical, the antithetical, 
the contradictory occurrences in our thinking are 
founded on tendencies very deep in human nature. It was 
not the mere blundering of the individual men of those 
days which led to rapid and contradictory changes of 
popular opinion and of social action; for instance, the 
practical expression of the abstract doctrine of the rights 
of men led to a social situation in which the rights of the 

81 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

victims of the Terror were so ruthlessly sacrificed; the 
propaganda of universal human freedom was sustained 
by bloody wars ; and in the end, the outcome of the Revo- 
lution was a military despotism. It is hardly a very deep 
account of these processes to say simply that the pendu- 
lum swings, and that excessive action leads to reaction. 
This is true. But it is a deeper truth that the ideas and 
passions of such a time are in their nature an union of 
antithetical tendencies. The passion for human liberty, 
in the form which it took during the early French Revo- 
lution was obviously an example of what Nietzsche has 
called the Wille zur Macht. Whatever the causes of the 
French Revolution, when it came it awakened a love of 
human freedom which was also a love of human might. 
The two aspects of this great fondness were antithetical, 
and for the moment inseparable. As the process devel- 
oped they contended, and the one contradicted the other. 
How could one express one's regard for human freedom 
except through one 's might ? But might can be expressed 
only through finding some one to conquer. Conquest 
depends upon discipline ; discipline requires a ruler. 

Of course this obvious instance of the revolutionary 
tendencies awakened the reflections of our philosophers. 
But the instance did not stand alone. All the greater 
emotions are dialectical. The tragedies of the storm and 
stress period, and of the classical and romantic litera- 
ture, are portrayals of this contradictory logic of pas- 
sion. Faust asks the highest, and therefore contracts 
with the devil and destroys Margaret. The romantic 
poets so loved emotion that their works are mainly de- 
voted to depicting the vanity of all the emotions. Outside 
of German literature, and in later times, one finds nu- 
merous instances of similar literary expressions of the 

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THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
dialectics of the emotions. The fascination and the power 
of Byron are due to his contradictions. Because of the 
loftiness of his emotional demands upon life, he finds 
only triviality and failure. His most characteristic ideal 
remains such a being as Manfred, whom the demons re- 
spect solely because his sins are deeper than theirs and 
because his internal remorse makes the external penal- 
ties of their hell seem by comparison insignificant. Man- 
fred's poetic dignity consists in his absolute conscious- 
ness of his own moral worthlessness in all matters except 
his honest self-condemnation. Others are deluded into 
hope or fear. He knows that there is nothing to lose; 
and this makes him a hero. Instances of the dialectics 
of the emotions abound in the European literature of the 
period between 1770 and 1830. And not all such in- 
stances are tragic. There is a glory in winning all by 
abandoning all. Wilhelm Meister, like Saul, sets out to 
seek asses, and finds a kingdom. Or, as the classic lyric 
puts the cheerful aspect of this same dialectic: 

1 ' Ich hab ' mein ' Sach ' auf Nichts gestellt 
Und mein gehort die ganze Welt. ' ' 

It is easy to say that all such phenomena express pre- 
cisely the unreasonableness of the emotions. But a closer 
view shows that this dialectical tendency belongs rather 
to the active will than to the mere emotions. Upon this 
both Hegel and his bitter enemy Schopenhauer, though 
in very different ways, are agreed, and upon this they 
both insist. The mere sentimentalists amongst the ro- 
mantic poets express such crises and such changes of 
point of view less effectively than do the more active na- 
tures. Byron is by nature a man of action who fails to 
find an absorbing career until he writes his last lyric 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
after landing in Greece. That is why his utmost cyni- 
cism or his profoundest gloom has always a note of man- 
liness about it that holds one's attention. To turn in the 
other direction, Goethe, full of emotional experience as 
he was, is rather a restlessly active man than a man of 
mere feeling. The dialectical process of his own activity 
brought him indeed to that splendid consciousness of 
calm and of inner self-possession which marked his best 
years ; but his processes are always those not of the man 
of merely changing sentiments but rather of the man 
who became the controller of his fortunes, the master of 
his deeds. 

Development through contradictions belongs then to 
the will, using that word in its merely popular sense, 
rather than to the relatively passive emotions. Can one 
still say that all such processes, whether of the emotions 
or of the will, belong ipso facto to the relatively irrational 
side of life ? I will not at this moment answer this ques- 
tion upon its merits. It is enough for my present pur- 
pose to say that the idealists, whose position I am 
here merely illustrating, insist that this is not the case. 
They insist that the law of development through antith- 
eses is characteristic not merely of the feelings, nor 
yet merely of what is unreasonable about our feelings 
and our will, but of the very life of reason itself. I have 
used the foregoing illustrations in order to show how 
deeply seated the dialectical or antithetical tendencies 
were in the life and in the literature of that age. The 
philosophy of our idealists was a reflection of the spirit 
of that time. Whether rightly or wrongly, these idealists 
did not seek to philosophize by merely purging their 
thoughts of all such antithetical tendencies, or by dem- 
onstrating that a sound thinker defines just one solid 

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THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSOLUTE 
and stable truth such as enables you to ignore, once for 
all, every contradiction as a mere blunder. On the con- 
trary, they developed a method which depends upon rec- 
ognizing that the truth is a synthesis of antithetical 
moments or aspects, which does not ignore but unifies 
opposition. 

This notion of truth is to many people so unsympa- 
thetic that I can only hope, at the moment, to indicate 
some way in which one who approaches it for the first 
time may be aided in treating fairly a point of view 
which only our later illustrations can render even tol- 
erably articulate. One is tempted to say, " Fickle emotions 
we know, contradictory attitudes of will we know, but 
the hypothesis of an essentially antithetical constitution 
of rational truth is a self-confessed absurdity. Something 
must be true. What is true excludes what is not true. 
Antithesis may arise, through our ignorance and our 
hastiness, on the way towards truth. Conflicting hypoth- 
eses may even wisely be formed, weighed, tested, as a 
means to the discovery of truth. But an antithetical or 
dialectical constitution of the truth is logically im- 
possible. ' ' 

I will not here undertake to answer this objection. 
I am only trying to smooth the way towards an histori- 
cal appreciation of this idealistic movement ; so I may as 
well point out a motive which may help to make the dia- 
lectical method comprehensible to students of contem- 
porary philosophy. Our idealists were, one and all, in a 
very genuine sense what people now call pragmatists. 
They were also, to be sure, absolutists; and nowadays 
absolutism is supposed to be peculiarly abhorrent to 
pragmatists. But of the historical, and perhaps also of 
the logical relations of pragmatism to absolutism we 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
shall see more hereafter. What I now emphasize is that all 
these thinkers make much of the relation of truth to ac- 
tion, to practice, to the will. Nothing is true, for them, 
unless therein the sense, the purpose, the meaning of 
some active process is carried out, expressed, accom- 
plished. Truth is not for these post-Kantian idealists 
something dead and settled apart from action. It is a 
construction, a process, an activity, a creation, an attain- 
ment. Im Anfang war die That. It is true, as I have said, 
that on the religious side these idealists had a certain 
sympathy with the tradition of the mystics whose God 
was found through an interior illumination. But I also 
said that the new doctrine was never meant to be any 
mere revival of mysticism. I tried to suggest its spirit 
by calling its religion a synthesis of mystical and of ra- 
tionalistic motives. What I now add is that these ration- 
alistic motives were dialectical, largely because of the 
stress that these thinkers laid upon the active element 
in thought, in truth, and in reality. 

The connection between what I have called the prag- 
matism of these thinkers and their dialectical method 
was the same as the connection already indicated, in our 
illustrations of the general tendencies of the time, when 
we pointed out how the life of the will itself involves the 
presence of antitheses and of conflicting motives. If 
truth is what some active process finds, but finds only 
because this very activity itself creates the truth, then 
truth will not be something that you can merely describe 
in terms of monotonous consistency but will partake 
of the conflicting motives upon which the will depends. 
This thought lies very deep in the whole philosophy of 
this age. How this thought is expressed, our later illus- 
trations will show. 

86 



LECTURE IV. 
THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING. 

THOSE indications of the general nature of the 
dialectical or antithetical method of philosophiz- 
ing with which the last lecture closed were 
intended to prepare us for a closer contact with the 
thinking processes characteristic of early post-Kantian 
idealism. Now I am to go on to some illustrations of this 
method, derived from the authors whom we are studying. 
My principal illustrations I shall choose, in this and in 
the next lecture, from one of the works of Schelling. Be- 
fore doing so, however, I must consider a few prelimi- 
nary and more general instances, in order to help us to 
a general view of the philosophical situation as our ideal- 
ists found and defined it. 

I. 

So far in these discussions, we have insisted on two 
aspects of the post-Kantian idealism. The first aspect we 
defined by saying that while this whole movement of 
thought was indeed a product of the general spirit of 
that revolutionary and romantic age, the idealistic phi- 
losophy derives its principal technical problem from 
Kant's deduction of the categories. The problem thus 
set was that of the relation both of the form, and, in a 
certain sense, of the material data of human experience 
to the self and the selves whose experience this is. This 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
general problem of the self, as we saw, inevitably in- 
volved the more special problems which concern the re- 
lations of the many human selves to one another, to the 
world of physical phenomena, and to the Absolute, as 
well as the connected problem of the mutual relation of 
the theoretical and the practical activities of the self. 
The second aspect of post-Kantian philosophy upon 
which we have dealt is the method of thinking which 
characterizes these inquirers. This was the antithetical or 
dialectical method. This method, as these thinkers employ 
it, is deliberately intended, not as a merely pedagogical 
device to lead an inquirer through preliminary errors 
to the final truth, but as a means of showing that the 
final truth itself is essentially dialetical or antithetical 
in its inmost constitution; so that you cannot utter a 
philosophical verity without giving it the form of an 
union or synthesis of explicitly opposed aspects or 
moments. 

In order to suggest that so paradoxical a view of the 
nature of truth may after all possess a certain plausibil- 
ity, I ventured in the last lecture to assert that our 
idealists were, upon the dialectical side of their thinking, 
essentially pragmatists, who regarded truth as always 
the outcome of a process or even as identical with a proc- 
ess, while the type of this process, to their minds, is 
that of our practical activity. And as I also suggested, 
the will, the practical activity of us all, is full of anti- 
thetical and so of dialectical characters. It is easy to 
illustrate this tendency empirically if you look at com- 
monplace facts of active life. The will aims at content- 
ment, yet in all active people it is restless in its tedium 
as soon as it reaches any stage of life where there is 
nothing to do. The will demands freedom from restraint, 

88 






THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
yet equally demands its expression in a social life 
which is full of restraints. It asserts itself in all sorts 
of self-surrendering, self-entangling, self-disappointing 
ways. The proud will of the vain man seeks with helpless 
dependence admirers and flatterers. The contrite will of 
the repentant sinner makes an ideal of despising itself, 
but may soon become, for that very reason, vain of its 
own humility, and then proudly wears, perhaps, a much 
prized professional ornament, the outward bearing or 
the dress that intrusively expresses to all beholders the 
fact of its self-effacement. The will of the people seeks 
freedom, and therefore accepts ere long the rule of des- 
pots or, in our age and land, the rule of the " bosses." 
Against such despots it in time revolts, and through this 
very revolt undertakes, not to obtain mere freedom, not 
the mere taking of a city by armed attack, but the 
hardest and most galling of all tasks, viz., the task of 
ruling the spirit, which the popular will, amongst us, has 
so far only partially learned to do. In brief, whatever 
the human will logically ought to be, it is in fact ex- 
tremely prone to contradictions, not only on its lower 
but on its higher levels. When some men maintain that 
contradictory motives and deeds are naturally character- 
istic merely of womankind, this judgment only shows a 
lack of reflection. The antithetical expression of the will, 
viewed as a merely natural tendency, is neither manly 
nor womanly ; it is human. Some people, to be sure, have, 
like Gladstone, more phrases than have others whereby 
to explain away their own natural contradictions of plan 
and of conduct. I intend no impertinence when I here 
add that the "strenuous life" even on its highest levels 
generally shows very marked and significant antitheses. 
This being the case, we saw, in the last lecture, that a 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
philosophy which views the truth rather as something ex- 
pressed in an active process than as a fixed realm of ab- 
stract principles or as a world of lifeless things in 
themselves, may be expected to make the most of the 
antithetical logic of the will in denning its own theory of 
the universe. 

II. 

Coming nearer to what is properly the foundation of 
the early idealistic philosophy, we may next point out 
that for these idealists, as already indicated, the self is to 
be the principle of philosophy. And the whole idealistic 
theory of self -consciousness turns upon the observation 
that the self is essentially a dialectical, an antithetical 
being, whose nature you can only conceive as an union 
of opposing, or as these thinkers often assert, of mutually 
contradictory tendencies. 

This thesis was strongly suggested by Kant's deduc- 
tion itself, although Kant avoids directly asserting it, 
owing to his elaborate training in holding his judgment 
suspended. He cannot tell what the self is. He refuses to 
commit himself upon the topic. Had he permitted him- 
self to express more explicitly what his discussion im- 
plied, the antithetical character of the self would have 
come more fully to light. Let us consider some of the 
antitheses implied in Kant's deduction. All experience, 
according to Kant, is for the self, and receives its form 
from the active application of the categories of the self. 
Yet the entire material of experience — material with- 
out which these forms would be entirely empty — is not 
due to the self, but is a datum of sense, passively re- 
ceived, and so far is whatever it chances to be. Moreover, 
the self in our ordinary life as observers of nature is 
surely not conscious from moment to moment of the way 

90 



THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
in which this its own activity gives form to the matter 
of experience. If it were thus conscious of how its cate- 
gories get into experience, the Critique of Pure Reason 
would be superfluous instruction. The self is primarily- 
unconscious of even those most necessary deeds whereby 
it becomes an informing principle to which is due the 
form of all objective phenomena and their submission to 
intelligible laws. The self seems to us from moment to 
moment merely to find as datum what in truth is its 
own deed. Largely unconscious of its own life, then, is 
the self. Yet it is known to us, on the purely theoretical 
side, solely as the knower, as the subject of conscious- 
ness. Its first office is that of the knower; but its life is 
largely that of unconsciousness. Since experience is one, 
this subject of consciousness must be one. Another 
man's objective experience is indeed valid for me; never- 
theless nothing appears to be more completely cut off 
and secreted from my knowledge than is any direct ex- 
perience of what the contents of my neighbor's experi- 
ence may be. "We, the many men, are constructively one 
in our experience ; yet, as phenomena, we are hopelessly 
apart, and our consciousnesses never flow into one. 
Finally, as we saw before, all human knowledge is of 
the empirical ; yet the very conception of human experi- 
ence is itself not an empirical concept. Nevertheless we 
are somehow to know that this concept has truth. 

Meanwhile the self, as we just said, is known to us 
as the one knower of experience. But whatever we con- 
cretely know, becomes, by virtue of an application of 
categories to sense facts, an object of experience, a phe- 
nomenon somewhere in time and in space. So soon as 
we try to know the self, it also becomes one of the phe- 
nomena, an empirical ego, the mere "me" of ordinary 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
life. This empirical ego, however, is simply not the true 
subject, the knower, whose unity of experience is a priori 
and necessary. For space, time, the categories — yes, all 
the world of phenomena, are in and of the self in so far 
as we are all the one subject. We — we as men, as various 
phenomena, as objects — are scattered about in our own 
forms of space and time, the prey of the natural laws 
that our transcendental unity of apperception predeter- 
mines. The self, as knower, categorizes all phenomena so 
that, for instance, the law of gravitation holds. Yet the 
empirical "me," the psycho-physical organism, falls, if 
that so chances, as helplessly out of the window as if his 
own understanding were not, according to Kant, the 
transcendental source of the form, and so of the laws, of 
all nature, including the laws which are exemplified by 
his own fall. Moreover, while the empirical ego is thus 
helplessly tumbling out of the phenomenal window, we 
may remark, regarding its correlate, the knower, that 
while that true self, the knower, is, we can speak of it in 
no objective terms, as a real fact, without applying cate- 
gories to it; yet we know that such categories are inap- 
plicable, since categories apply only to phenomena, and 
no phenomenon is the self that knows phenomena. 
Finally, the self is presupposed by us as a virtual or 
transcendental subject. Yet we can assign no final truth 
to the concept of the self regarding it as more than a 
merely virtual unity. And all these problems refer 
simply to the theoretical aspect of the case. The problems 
about the practical ego are left out of sight in this 
enumeration. 

Thus the Kantian deduction introduces us to a 
richly dialectical realm. Nothing, of course, is easier 
than for one who listens to a sketch of these paradoxes 

92 



THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
to dispose of the whole subject, in his own mind, by 
simply saying, ' 1 What nonsense philosophers can utter, ' ' 
and then passing on to the order of his own day. 
That is indeed simple enough. Unfortunately one who 
thus disposes of the matter fails to note that he cannot 
attempt to articulate the common sense doctrines which 
bear upon these same topics of the self and its realm 
of knowledge without passing through a series of anti- 
thetical propositions which are quite as numerous and 
quite as paradoxical as those which Kant's deduction 
brings to the notice of a reflective mind. The difference 
between common sense and the philosophical doctrine is 
simply that the philosopher, by his finer analysis, re- 
veals the paradoxes which our everyday consciousness 
veils by means of a more or less thoughtless traditional 
phraseology. The philosopher is more frank with his an- 
titheses. He does not invent the paradoxes; he confesses 
them. Common sense pretends to be free from these con- 
tradictions; but its freedom consists in a mere refusal 
to reflect. The behavior of common sense much resembles 
that of the smooth-tongued and obtuse man, who con- 
fidently accuses womankind of a peculiar tendency to 
contradictions, without confessing that his own practi- 
cal attitude towards all womankind is, as is usually the 
case, a very nest of somewhat portentous contradictions. 
As a fact, the problems of Kant's deduction are the 
problems of all of us. We all naturally insist that ex- 
perience is our guide ; yet we transcend our own literal 
experience with every assertion that we make, as for 
instance when we assert that other men exist and have 
experience. We all naturally regard ourselves and all 
our ideas, as a mere by-product of organic processes, 
and as the sport of physical fortunes; yet we persist 

93 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
that the real world is such as to be subjected, in some 
sense, to the laws of our reason, so that the more our in- 
sight possesses inner and reasonable clearness, the more 
it seems to us likely to be true beyond ourselves. In brief, 
we insist that the world is independent of our ideas; 
and yet we are always dealing, when we try to know, 
merely with a choice of the ideal attitudes of our own 
consciousness. To other men we frequently say, ''The 
fact is thus and so, no matter what you think. " And 
that seems to us the correct way of defining reality. But 
for ourselves we often say, "Since I cannot think it 
otherwise, it must be so. ' ' And that seems to us equally 
a correct expression of our relations to reality. Yet 
withal, we despise the philosophers for making this dia- 
lectic, and other such paradoxes explicit; and, like the 
obtuse man marvelling at the outspoken woman, we sol- 
emnly say to the philosopher, ' ' Why will you thus contra- 
dict yourself ? " In such cases, however, we are careful to 
tell neither the woman nor the philosopher what it is 
that we ourselves seriously believe. There are two simple 
ways to avoid all dialectical complications. One is an 
easy way, viz., not to think at all. The other is a prudent 
way, viz., not to confess your thoughts. Philosophers 
scorn both ways. They try to confess their contradic- 
tions, to live through them, and so, if may be, to get 
beyond them. 

You will no doubt respond that the truth cannot 
consist merely of such contradictions as those indicated. 
The contradictions, you will say, must somehow be 
solved, reconciled, unified. When you become aware of 
this requirement, you emphasize a feature that the parti- 
sans of the dialectical method also kept in sight. To say 
that the truth is essentially dialectical is not, for them, to 

94 






THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
assert that the truth is a mere mass of contradictions — 
of accidental, hopeless and final conflicts. They have as 
much interest as anyone else in solving, in reconciling, 
in bringing to unity, the antitheses. What they mean by 
declaring that the truth is essentially antithetical or dia- 
lectical is, that contradictions such as those involved in 
the foregoing assertions about the self are not merely 
blunders due to inadvertence or to the incapacity of a 
philosopher, the hasty hypotheses of an ignorant learner, 
which have to be eliminated before one can see the truth. 
If the truth, for instance, involves, includes, determines, 
the process of self -consciousness, then the contradictory 
views of the self will express real moments, stages, fea- 
tures of this process — features of inner self-division 
and differentiation without which the self would not be 
what it is ; so that you can only see what the final truth 
is by first grasping, and then bringing together into 
some higher unity, these antitheses; that is, by showing 
why the self must pass through these dialectical stages. 
How the unifying process of reconciliation takes place, 
if at all, according to these idealists, we are hereafter 
to see. The notable characteristic of the dialectical 
method which is here in mind consists in the thesis that 
you cannot grasp the truth of the self without taking 
account of these various mutually contradictory pro- 
cesses, so that nobody can say, ' ' I have stated the truth 
about the self in a way that simply avoids all the con- 
tradictions of my predecessors (as for instance the con- 
tradictions of Kant), since these contradictions are mere 
blunders.' ' No, in case the self is a process, and this 
process is, like that of the human will, one that essen- 
tially expresses itself in the assumption of mutually con- 
tradictory points of view, and only thereafter in some 

95 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
higher synthesis of these, then the contradictions be- 
long not to the blunders of the philosopher, but to the 
very life of the self. When, in your account of the self 
you assert contradictory propositions, no doubt your ac- 
count is so far incomplete. You cannot rest in that ac- 
count. You have not told the whole truth. But according 
to the view of these philosophers, you cannot escape from 
this incompleteness merely like the disorderly member of 
Parliament, who says, at the speaker's order, "I with- 
draw my assertion.' ' Even the disorderly member does 
not thus escape from his position. In effect he continues 
to make the assertion thus formally withdrawn. If you 
are to get the truth, the contradictions will prove to be 
necessary moments in the expression of the whole truth, 
even as the disorderly member's assertion and with- 
drawal equally belong to and characterize his true posi- 
tion. You have gained by the contradictions if only you 
first take them seriously and then attempt to rise above 
them, for they are necessary stages of your self-ex- 
pression. 

III. 

I have so far spoken of the idealists without discrimi- 
nation. In historical sequence, they bore different rela- 
tions to the dialectical method. Fichte, in the first 
exposition of his Science of Knowledge was the first phi- 
losopher to define this procedure as the universal phil- 
osophical method. And he did so with explicit reference 
to the fact that for him the self is the principle of 
philosophy. The problem of the self is furnished by 
the fact that whatever I know, whatever I acknowledge, 
whatever I experience, I can only grasp the true mean- 
ing of my experience, of my assertions, of my insight, 

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THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
by explicitly reflecting that all these contents are in 
and of the self. That this self of philosophy is not the 
individual man of ordinary life, appears from the very 
outset of Fichte's discussion. The individual man of or- 
dinary life is one of the beings to be denned by philos- 
ophy, and is certainly not the principle of philosophy. 
The self, appearing at the outset as the abstract princi- 
ple of philosophy, is to be transformed, by the philo- 
sophical process, into the true self, the self rightly 
denned and embodied. The philosophical process in ques- 
tion is itself, at every step, one of reflection. Whatever 
is asserted at any stage of the inquiry, one must forth- 
with add, "The self asserts this"; in other words, "This 
is known as true in so far as I posit this." The fact 
I posit this is thus logically prior to the fact This is. 
But hereupon one observes that the very problem of 
philosophy, and in fact all the problems of life and 
of science, may be summed up in the law that I always 
inevitably posit data, of sense, of nature, and of life, 
and posit them so that I view them as facts found 
by me, but not posited by me. This then is my original 
nature, viz., to acknowledge what I still stubbornly view 
not as my acknowledgment, but as something not my- 
self, and as given, from without, to myself. That this is 
my nature, Fichte attempts to show, not merely upon 
the basis of experience, but upon the basis of the obser- 
vation that all logical classifications and discriminations 
turn upon the recognition of what is essentially not my- 
self. The fundamental paradox of philosophy is then 
this, that, from the reflective or philosophical point of 
view, I can know nothing which the self does not posit, 
that is, define, acknowledge, determine, as its own object ; 
while, on the other hand, the way in which I, in real 

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i 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
life treat my world, is to view it as not myself, so that 
I posit my world precisely as that which I myself hold 
to be due to no act of mine. The first thesis of Fichte's 
philosophy is: The self posits just the self, and here- 
with posits whatever it can acknowledge as known or 
as knowable to the self. The equally inevitable antithesis 
is: The self posits a not-self; that is, defines its own 
object as not its own, but as another, opposed in nature 
to its own nature. The thesis and antithesis need to be 
united through a synthesis — a principle just to both 
these aspects of self -consciousness. 

I shall not attempt to indicate, in this connection, how 
Fichte develops the synthesis thus abstractly defined. 
It turns out, in the sequel, that this thesis, as first formu- 
lated by Fichte, proves to be again dialectical, and to de- 
velop new antitheses, which require new syntheses. But 
the first form of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre is pecul- 
iarly ill-adapted to a detailed treatment in a general 
discussion such as this. I have mentioned so much regard- 
ing its procedure in order to do a passing act of bare 
justice to the man who originated the modern dialectical 
method. Complete justice cannot here be done to Fichte. 
I pass on to another illustration of the dialectical method, 
appearing in a more highly developed form, in Schell- 
ing's System des Transcendentalen Idealismus. 

Since our task is not one of a history of idealism, but 
only of illustrations, you will not object to my ignoring 
just now a great number of questions concerning this 
work such as your textbooks of the history of this 
period will readily answer. What Schelling's early re- 
lation to Fichte was; how close they were at one time 
together; but how Schelling's idealism from the first 
tended to contrast with that of Fichte — all these things 

98 



THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
are written in well-known books. I shall not expand upon 
such matters at present. 

It is enough to remind you of the main contrast be- 
tween Fichte and Schelling. Fichte was first of all an 
ethical idealist. To his mind the philosophical prob- 
lem denned by the Kantian deduction of the categories 
was simply the problem how the self, not, mind you, 
the individual man, but the true self, whatever that may 
be, determines, consciously or unconsciously, the form 
and the matter of its own entire experience, expresses 
itself in the life of the individual man, and embodies its 
meaning in the process of its entire human world of 
action. The one key to the solution of the whole prob- 
lem is, for Fichte, the ethical conception of the self. 
To live a life of action, and in this life to win nothing 
but its own full self-expression — this is the one purpose, 
the one principle of that self, which is itself the princi- 
ple of all truth. 

Action, however, as we saw, is essentially dialectical. 
It means winning one's own in a world which is all the 
while viewed as foreign. The active purpose posits its 
own opponent, and for that very reason views even this 
its own act of positing its opponent as an act forced upon 
it by an alien power. It thus defines its world in terms 
of an essentially incomprehensible antithesis, which 
makes action possible but which is never reducible to 
terms of a complete theoretical definiteness. The world 
problem can, therefore, be solved only in practical, in eth- 
ical, never in purely theoretical terms. If I merely saw 
my world as already my own completed work, I should 
have nothing to do. But I am essentially a doer. With the 
completion of all deeds, both I and my world would van- 
ish together. To see my world as wholly mine is, there- 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
fore, simply the unattainable goal of an endless process. 
Theoretical philosophy can indeed define the categories, 
the forms of this process, but never its essential meaning. 
The meaning is that the world is the material for my 
duty, made manifest in my experience. Fortune, limita- 
tions, individual selfhood, social life, freedom, immortal- 
ity — these are incidents in the endless undertaking. Ex- 
perience seems foreign, just in order that our duty may 
be done in acts that win control over experience. Such, 
in the briefest outline, is Fichte 's result. 

Schelling, on the contrary, is only in the second place 
an ethical thinker. He is primarily devoted to theoretical 
construction. He is in fact a genius in the use of the 
speculative imagination. He is meanwhile an observer. 
He shares the typical restlessness of his age, the individ- 
ualism, the self-confidence, and, in a measure, the roman- 
tic sentiment. But he is fond of nature, of art, and, in an 
amateurish way, of the detail of experience, and of intui- 
tions. Despite his wonderful constructive skill, he is 
unfortunately a little too fond of fine phrases, and as a 
young man he is especially fond of a breathless rapidity 
of productive work. I have called him observant, and 
such he is, with a great keenness and sensitiveness to de- 
tails; but he is not an investigator of experience, for 
whatever detail catches his attention at once awakens 
his fondness for fantastic analogies and for generaliza- 
tions which express much more genius than discretion. 
The most orderly and finished of his early works is the 
System of Transcendental Idealism, where he had the 
guidance of Fichte as his predecessor, and the skill to 
supplement Fichte 's one-sided moralism by a recognition 
of aspects of reality which appeal to the eye of the nat- 
uralist, and of the lover of art, rather than merely to the 

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THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
rugged ethical idealism of Fichte. Since I cannot attempt 
to give here any fair view of the wealth of Schelling's 
thought, I confine myself to this one book as an illustra- 
tion of his methods. 

IV. 
For Schelling, at the time when he published, in 1797, 
the System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, the work 
of philosophy appeared to fall, as he tells us, into two 
distinct departments, eternally opposed, and therefore, 
as he adds, eternally inseparable. For the dialectic which 
the deduction of the categories suggests to him, is not 
only the dialectic of the self, but also the perfectly paral- 
lel dialectic of the not-self, or, as he usually calls it, of 
nature. The world of the deduction of the categories 
is, namely, on the one hand, the world as object, that is, 
as known; on the other hand the world as subject, that 
is, as the knower. Take experience as you find it. Ab- 
stract, by what Schelling regards as a deliberately one- 
sided but relatively justified abstraction, from the self 
that knows experience and from the problem as to how 
this self comes by its categories, and then you have 
before you the world called nature. This nature is of 
course not any "thing in itself/ ' For the philosopher 
knows all the while that it is simply an object, and that 
the object implies the subject, so that what is known is 
known to somebody. But Schelling asks you first to be 
deliberately naive, while you observe, although with the 
philosopher's thought in the background, outer nature; 
view nature as something found. Look not at the sub- 
ject. Look without, at the object, at the totality of 
phenomena. At once, thinks Schelling, it then becomes 
obvious that nature itself, this endless phenomenon in 
time and space, is not a mere substance or a collection 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

of substances, but is a process and a system of processes. 
An intuitive observation, an open eye, sees in nature 
the objective dialectic of the processes there present. 
Everything in nature, so Schelling insists, seeks its own 
opposite, and transcends, by its relationships, its own 
isolated being. We need not here pause to portray how 
this occurs. I will not trouble you with Schelling 's phi- 
losophy of nature. It is enough to say that Schelling 
observed in nature three principal aspects: (1) On every 
level of nature there is a total relativity of the sort just 
indicated, whereby everything depends upon an anti- 
thetical relation to what is other than itself. Every nat- 
ural object is an unity, or as Schelling likes to insist, a 
polarity, of mutually opposed tendencies, whose very 
opposition unites them. Attractive and repulsive forces 
as they exist in nature, the polarity of the structure of 
the magnet, the opposition of positive and of negative 
electricity, the general conceptions of chemical affinity 
as Schelling could then gather a crude notion of them 
from the then current investigations, the well-known 
unions of opposing processes in organic life, the facts 
regarding the reproduction of living forms — these were 
favorite instances of Schelling 's general conception of 
the universally antithetical constitution of nature. I am 
not here estimating these views, only suggesting them. 
So much, then, for the total relativity of natural 
phenomena. Already, on this basis Schelling could, 
from his own point of view, draw the conclusion : Every- 
thing in objective nature has the same essential form as 
also appears in the life of the conscious self. Nature, 
viewed as object, appears thus as a community of uncon- 
scious, or as one might say, slumbering selves. The whole 
of nature has the structure of the life of the self. 

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THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 

(2) But now nature appears to us as a series of levels, 
or as Schelling calls them, Potenzen. On each level, the 
general forms of lower levels are repeated, but in a more 
complete and organized embodiment. The contrast be- 
tween inorganic and organic nature is, for Schelling, an 
instance of such a contrast of levels or Potenzen. I need 
not here attempt to specify this doctrine as Schelling 
worked it out. 

(3) Moreover, a general character reigns throughout 
nature which may be denned as a tendency towards the 
evolution of subjectivity, that is of mind. That which in 
us is self -consciousness, may be viewed, if we choose, in 
its psycho-physical relations. If this is done, self-con- 
sciousness appears in the natural world as a result of 
phenomenal conditions, and so as a product of nature. 
To the observer of the objective world, it is as if con- 
sciousness were an evolution from nature. And Schell- 
ing, who is fond of psycho-physical considerations, 
and who is a sort of halfway evolutionist, regards this 
point of view, for which consciousness is a product of 
nature, as, in its own way, perfectly justified. Begin thus 
with the object, and before your eyes it develops itself 
into a subject. If, as an idealist, you are all the while 
well aware that an object without a subject is impossi- 
ble, so that you know, even while you thus observe the 
natural process, that nature is, for the knowing subject, 
its own phenomenon, you can nevertheless quite fear- 
lessly admit that, so far as you deliberately abstract from 
the knower and merely look at the object as it appears, 
you then inevitably observe that psychic life is a product 
of a natural process. There is, in this way, a relatively 
justified materialism quite possible — yes, in its place 
inevitable for the philosopher. Mind is indeed, when thus 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
viewed, the outcome of nature. Schelling is sure that he 
can fully reconcile such a view with idealism. 

What is, then, the result of all this deliberate abstrac- 
tion, such as gives rise to the philosophy of nature ? The 
answer is: Nature, as thus viewed, appears simply as a 
sort of external symbol or image of the self. Nature is 
the self taken as object — the self unconscious, hidden, 
but endlessly striving to free itself and to become con- 
scious. Nature is the process whereby the dialectic of the 
self's own life appears in outward manifestation, first as 
dead mechanism, but never without an union of mutually 
opposing forces, then as the pervasive affinity that 
binds nature's oppositions together, higher still, as the 
life of plants and animals, and at length, as the natural 
process whereby the human individual becomes conscious. 
Thus, in outline, a philosophy of nature leads to an 
identification of the self with the natural process here 
presupposed. 

Let us turn from this distinctly fanciful but profound 
interpretation of nature as, so to speak, the external ap- 
parition of an unconscious self, to the much less arbi- 
trarily worked out, although still often wayward, con- 
structions of the System of Transcendental Idealism 
itself. 



If nature is the unconscious form of the principle 
which becomes conscious in the self, and if, when we 
thus view the world, the conscious self phenomenally 
appears as an evolution from nature, how will the whole 
situation appear to us when we instead abstract, for the 
time, from all externally given data, and fix our atten- 
tion wholly upon the subject, as that in and for whom 

104 



THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
is all knowledge and all fact ? Thus to view the situation 
is, after one has learned the lesson of the Kantian deduc- 
tion and of the idealistic movement, an inevitable phil- 
osophical undertaking. What Schelling wants to make 
manifest is that, just as the objective view leads us to 
regard nature as a process of unconscious dialectic out 
of which, through a psycho-physical process, the con- 
sciousness of the self is evolved, so too this subjective 
view of the same world will show us nature as that which 
the self necessarily, although unconsciously, constructs. 
Nature, viewed as the construction of the self, is the basis 
upon which self-conscious activities are to be founded. 
The Philosophy of Nature had asserted : If nature is, the 
self must be evolved from it, for nature is an uncon- 
scious image of the self, struggling on various levels to 
idealize its life into the form of self -consciousness. The 
Philosophy of Transcendental Idealism will assert: 
An experience of an external natural order is uncon- 
sciously constructed by the self, even as a basis for its 
own attainment of self -consciousness. The categories of 
this experience are to be deduced one by one, as the sys- 
tem develops. They are to be displayed as forms neces- 
sary to the attainment of conscious self-expression on the 
part of the self. 

In order to undertake the task thus set for the tran- 
scendental idealism, you have to form a philosophically 
exact conception of the self. That in order to do this 
you have to abstract from the empirical ego of ordinary 
consciousness, we have already observed, and Schelling 
explicitly insists upon this consideration. The human per- 
son whom I call myself, the ' ' me, ' ' is one of the phenom- 
ena, or is a certain complex of phenomena. The self, 
however, is just the hnower of phenomena. If I am to 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
grasp the concept of this knower, of this subject as such, 
I must in some way be capable of a thinking process 
which, as Schelling also insists, "becomes immediately 
its own object ;" and in the introduction to his Tran- 
scendental Idealism, Schelling enlarges at some length 
upon the conditions that must be fulfilled in order that 
such a thinking process should take place. We need not 
here enter into a discussion of these conditions. Certain 
it is, however, that the situation of one who undertakes, 
from any point of view, to know the knower, is a situation 
involving an obviously dialectical process. For, whatever 
object one seizes upon merely as object, whether that ob- 
ject be something in physical nature, or is some in- 
ternal mental state, this object, as such, is certainly not 
the knowing subject, but exists for, or in relation to the 
subject. The self, then, is at all events not to be known 
as ordinary objects are known, for they are other than 
whoever it is that knows them. The self, however, in self- 
knowledge, is to be object only in so far as it is also self — 
known only in so far as it is also knower. It is to be fact 
for somebody only in so far as this somebody for whom 
the fact is, is identical with the very fact which is for 
him. Schelling therefore lays stress upon the thought that 
the self cannot be in its true nature sundered from the 
very act of self-consciousness. Its existence consists in 
this act. Its being is its own conscious doing. The self is 
no substance that could exist whether it were known or 
not. It exists only in so far as it is known, that is, only 
in so far as it is known to itself. ' ' The ego is nothing dif- 
ferent from its own thought ; the thought of the self and 
the self are absolutely one, ' ' so Schelling states the case. 
The ego is i( kein Ding, keine Sache." "It is object only 
in so far as it makes itself object." Any purely objective 

106 



THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 

existence then, must be denied to the self. It is not for 
any merely external being, but only for itself. 

When one thus views the matter, one 's first impression 
is that Schelling 's philosophy of self -consciousness will 
turn out to be brief and in expression simple enough, but 
for that very reason hopelessly problematical. For a very 
few tautologies would apparently suffice to exhaust all 
that is possible in this account of a being who is to be 
only what he makes himself out to be, and just in so far 
as he knows himself, while he can apparently know of 
himself only this, viz., that he is just the knower. Such an 
autobiography appears so far to be tediously brief and 
uneventful. The paradoxical simplicity of such a doctrine 
is already sufficiently indicated if we remember certain 
Hindoo philosophers (of whom we now know a good deal, 
and of whom Schelling, at the time when he wrote this 
book, was almost entirely ignorant). These early Hindoo 
philosophers of the Upanishads, used to define the self by 
an endless abstraction from every sort and form of ob- 
jective existence. What they obtained as the concept of 
the true self was therefore a certain pure emptiness of 
all contents. The self for them was said to be very lofty, 
but was as good as Nothing. Schelling 's concept of the 
self seems at first sight to tend wholly in this direction 
of pure emptiness. "I am I" says the self; and so far 
this is the whole account of it. 

It will be remembered, however, that for Schelling, the 
entire interest in this attempt to define the self is iden- 
tical with that of Kant's deduction. The world of objects 
yonder — it is for me whatever I have to find in it ; there- 
fore my nature as knower is expressed in all this wide 
world that I know : this, as we have all along seen, is the 
thought upon which the investigations of all these phi- 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
losophers are centered. When Schelling thus undertakes 
to define the self, he is therefore looking for what he 
himself calls the Princip des Wissens. He desires to show 
that this apparently empty concept of' a being whose 
whole nature it is to exist as self-knower, is in fact an 
infinitely wealthy and fruitful concept. The act of self- 
knowledge, to be sure, apparently predetermines, so far 
as we can yet see, only itself. For if you attempt, in con- 
ception, to give to the self from without, an object — a 
content — that content by hypothesis is not the self, and 
therefore it is simply not the content of this still so mys- 
terious act of self-knowledge. So long as the self is sup- 
posed merely to know such external contents, it is not 
knowing itself. On the other hand, if you deprive the 
self of all contents that are other than itself, that is, if 
you abstract from outer physical facts known, from inner 
feelings felt, from accidental happenings of fortune, and 
from all determined laws of its own mental nature ; then 
what remains of the self but just nothing at all? Schell- 
ing nevertheless wishes to show that this apparently so 
empty concept is an adequate source of the whole system 
of truth. 

His procedure in the development of this character- 
istic paradox of the dialectical method begins as follows : 
One has to distinguish, in any case, the two aspects of 
knowledge which the nature of the self, as thus defined, 
has somehow to unify. '•- If I be I, as I think I be," then 
as self-knower, I am in fact both object and subject, both 
known and knower, in one indivisible unity. But the two 
aspects of this unity are by definition as unsymmetrically 
related as they are inseparable. The self as knower, as 
subject, constitutes, by hypothesis, that aspect of this 
unity of subject and object which is the truer and the 

108 



THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
deeper aspect of the whole situation. For the character 
of the self as knower, is primal and fundamental. This 
whole idealism springs, as you remember, from the thesis 
that whatever object exists has to be viewed as existing 
for the knower — that is, as a fact for knowledge. The 
self then is above all a knower. Schelling calls this sub- 
jective side of the self its ideal, that is, its knowing, 
aspect. But viewed merely and abstractedly in this as- 
pect, the self is, as we have now seen, limitless yet 
empty, without form, without contents — a knower, but 
so far a knower of nothing. On the other hand, by defini- 
tion, the self is also to be knower of itself. That is, as 
known, the self has to be, by hypothesis, an object. Now, 
as Schelling hereupon says, an object is something deter- 
minate, something limited, bounded, distinguished from 
other objects, fixed by the attention, held fast, found. 
The self, precisely in so far as it is to be an object to 
itself, has, then, to include an objective aspect which is 
not boundless but which is definite and has form and 
is possessed of limits and distinctions. This is the sub- 
ordinate, the secondary, the instrumental, and in so far 
the less true aspect of the self. Schelling calls it the real 
aspect of the self. This real aspect is never separable, 
except by abstraction, from the ideal one. The real aspect 
exists, so to speak, solely for the sake of the ideal aspect. 
It is as if the self said, "I am I; that is, I am the 
knower ; but in order thus to be the knower I have, after 
all, to exist. In order to exist I have to have determinate 
content and character. I should not be the knower were 
I not also the known. And in order to be known I have 
to be found, felt, observed. And this I could not be unless 
I took on definite characters. So herewith I determine 
myself to become limited." 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
Thus the self, in order to be a self at all, is committed 
to an internal differentiation of its own nature, in such 
wise, however, that the differentiated aspects are not 
upon the same level. As knower, i.e., in its ideal aspect, 
the self is without determination of structure, since only 
objects are determinate. Hence, when viewed merely as 
knower, the self has no definite constitution. But as 
object known to itself, the self has a definite constitu- 
tion; for only thus can it become object. It follows that, 
in general, no one objective form or constitution that the 
self can ever assume, can possibly be an adequate expres- 
sion of its own ideal nature as knower. Yet, on the other 
hand, in order that the self should be known to itself, 
it must thus assume definite forms and constitutions. Its 
self-determined destiny is, then, to express itself in ob- 
jective forms which are always inadequate to its own 
requirements. To adapt one of Mr. Bradley's phrases: 
Schelling's self might be said to have no assets except 
its objective embodiments; yet none of these are the 
whole of it, nor in any of them is its ideal aspect incor- 
porated. So that were it only object, the self would be 
bankrupt. 

To express the matter otherwise: Schelling regards 
the self as an union of two opposed activities, which are 
unsymmetrically correlated. The one is the limitless, in 
fact the illimitable, ideal, or the knowing activity. This 
no objective expression of the self ever exhausts. What- 
ever is known is not yet the knower. So in its knowing 
aspect, the self is nowhere simply expressed. The other 
aspect is the limited, the determinate, the definite, or the 
real activity. This expresses itself in single deeds, in de- 
terminate contents, in particular facts, in the explicitly 
finite constitution of experience. The forms of this finite 

110 



THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
constitution are the categories. The results of this activ- 
ity of self -limitation are the phenomena of the world, as 
the subject knows them. These phenomena exist simply 
because, if the knower were not its own object, then the 
knower would not exist at all. Yet as they exist, these 
results of the objective activity are never adequate to 
their own purpose. 

Were this the whole story of the life of the self, its 
dialectic process would simply consist of a life of inade- 
quate self-expression in an infinity of known and self- 
constructed objects, no one of which would ever be the 
knower. But the process thus defined is not yet com- 
pletely characterized. 

It is not enough, thinks Schelling, for us to say that the 
self must thus be both a known object and a knowing 
subject and that it must possess as its actual constitution 
this union of mutually opposed activities. For in describ- 
ing the self we have, after all, merely once more assigned 
to it a constitution. We have characterized it. We have 
treated it as a botanist treats a plant. We have thus not 
finished our own account. For that the self should be an 
union of these two correlative activities, this we can as- 
sert only by assigning to the self, by virtue of our very 
language, some objective character, as a sort of really ex- 
isting natural fact. However, the self as knower must 
not only possess this constitution but must also know 
itself as possessing this constitution. That is, it must know 
itself as this indivisible union of a knowing subject (lim- 
itless, active, all-possessing, free), with a known object 
(determinate, self -opposing, limited, incorporated). That 
is, the self must view itself as thus internally divided, 
just as we are now trying to view it. 

Hereupon there comes to light a consideration that 
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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

determines the form and the sequence of the parts of 
Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism. This 
consideration is furnished by the difference between the 
conscious and the unconscious expression of the self. 

The self, once more, is to be a self-knower. This re- 
quires, as we have seen, that the self should possess a 
dual constitution, that of the knower and that of the 
known. As knower it is formless, free from definite 
determination, limitless. As known, it is object, and 
hence determinate, full of definite distinctions, and, in 
every one of its expressions, limited, and thus inadequate 
to the limitlessness of its own true nature. All this, we 
have said, is its constitution. Now we add another reflec- 
tion, "And this its own constitution," we say, "must 
become known to the self in order that it should be the 
self." Here, however, we define a new duality, namely, 
between the actual constitution of the self and the 
knowledge which the self possesses regarding this its own 
constitution. So far as the self possesses this constitu- 
tion here defined but does not recognize that it possesses 
it as its own way of expressing itself, the self remains 
in a relatively unconscious position. It constructs, but 
observes the result of the construction as a fact, and not 
as its own inevitable self-expression. It so far regards its 
own constructions as if they were mere objects and not 
as if they were its own deeds. What it is all the while 
learning to know in these objects, is indeed its own work 
and nothing but its own work. Yet the self, on the lower 
level just defined, is unrefleetive. It so far does not recog- 
nize itself in these its own deeds. It is a subject-object. 
But it does not say, regarding its object, "This object 
I myself am. ' ' The inevitable asymmetry of the relation 
of object and subject necessitates, in Schelling's opinion, 

112 



THE DIALECTICAL METHOD IN SCHELLING 
a stage of consciousness in which the self, in order to be 
its own object, expresses itself in a world of determinate 
phenomena, but still does not recognize that this is merely 
its own self-expression. In order, however, to be a self, 
our knower must express itself in this lower stage, and 
must in addition express itself in a still higher stage 
which it reaches when it not merely incorporates itself 
in a world, but recognizes itself in its own self-expression. 
The result is so far this: The self must first uncon- 
sciously express itself in an endless variety of particular 
facts, in order that it should also be able, in a higher 
phase of its life, to recognize its own world as its own 
expression. Consequently, all conscious self-expression is 
based upon unconscious self-expression. The true self is 
indeed only as self -knower; but it cannot become self- 
knower unless it first expresses itself unconsciously, as it 
does in our consciousness of nature, and then expresses 
itself consciously, as it does in us when we are aware of 
our deeds as our own. 

Thus it is that Schelling tries to make clear why the 
self, whose whole being it is simply to be self-knower, 
should nevertheless express itself in an endless variety 
of special experiences, while this very expression has to 
be made, at the outset, in a relatively unconscious form. 
The self, in giving itself embodiment, cannot recognize 
its own deed as its own unless it learns to recognize itself 
through a subsequent and distinct act of reflection. Thus 
then, self-consciousness is, for Schelling, rooted in a 
prior life of unconsciousness. I can only win the world 
for the self in case I first unconsciously express myself, 
in my natural life, and in my apparently foreign experi- 
ence, and then reflect upon the expression. Self-attain- 
ment involves a prior search for the self, which first 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
exists in an unconscious embodiment, and then and only- 
then learns what is, after all, its essential art, namely 
that of self-conscious expression. 

Such is our first glimpse of Schelling's position. 



114 



LECTURE V. 

SCHELLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL 
IDEALISM. 

IN the latter portion of the foregoing lecture we made 
our first acquaintance with Schelling's treatment of 
the problem of the self, and also with his form of the 
dialectical method. In opening the present discussion, we 
shall be aided in recalling our result, if we endeavor to 
make clear to ourselves what it was that Schelling sup- 
posed himself to have accomplished through the decid- 
edly abstract and subtle considerations of which I sought 
to give some sketch. 

I. 
The problem before him was, as we have seen, the prob- 
lem of defining the relation of the objective world to the 
self. At the outset of his treatise, he briefly sketched the 
main considerations with which the result of the Kantian 
deduction had already made us familiar. The world was 
somehow to be defined as containing nothing essentially 
external to the true self. The self that is in question is, 
as we all along saw, not the self of any individual, but 
the self that, at the outset of the system, expressly ap- 
pears as an abstract principle of all knowledge and of 
all reality. The objective world that was to be defined, 
appeared at the outset as the realm of phenomena, that 
is, expressly as the known, and as an object only in so 
far as it is conceived to be known to the self. The self, on 

115 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
the other hand, was defined as the knower. The problem 
of this philosophy is, then, the one of defining the relation 
of the known to the knower, of the object to the subject. 
The problem appeared difiicult for two reasons, opposed 
yet correlative to each other. The first reason lay in the 
fact that the knower, when defined with the degree of 
abstraction that Schelling gave to the concept, tended to 
appear as something which was simply not any object, 
since an object is, ipso facto, something known and is 
therefore not the knower of that object. The other diffi- 
culty of the doctrine lay in the fact that, granting the 
knower to be somehow or other known, the concept of the 
knower so far appeared to be a concept out of which 
nothing would follow regarding the contents of the world 
of phenomena. For whatever the knower is, Schelling 
defines this being as in any case its own possessor, its 
own activity. But the phenomenal world is certainly one 
that we are not conscious of creating. "We find it — this 
phenomenal world — as something apparently independ- 
ent of us, and as something that appears in consequence 
incapable of being deduced from the nature of our own 
consciousness. The ingenious discussion in which Schell- 
ing deals with this problem undertakes, as we saw, to 
solve both aspects of the problem on the basis of a single 
consideration. The self viewed as the knower is, so he 
says, to be precisely the knower of itself, and conse- 
quently an object to itself. But the nature of an object, 
so Schelling maintains, implies something finite, deter- 
mined, and discovered or found. The nature of a subject, 
that is, of a knower, implies freedom from determinate 
character, since determination belongs to an object, and 
consequently implies what Schelling calls a tendency to 
transcend every limitation, or, as he prefers to say, an 

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SCHELLING 'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
endless or illimitable type of activity. The general sense 
of this thought is, that in so far as one is knower he 
lacks the limitations and determinations which character- 
ize an object precisely because whatever is character- 
ized as an object becomes thereby something determi- 
nate, and whatever one speaks of as determinate, or as 
having a definite nature, becomes thereby an object. In 
so far as the self is a knower, it must lack, then, such 
limitations and such determinateness. This purely ab- 
stract consideration could be supplemented by the fact 
that, as we are all aware, our effort to know always leads 
us, just so far as we are trying to be knowers, to strive 
beyond any particular limitations to which our knowl- 
edge is, so far, subject. If you view knowing pragmati- 
cally, that is, as a sort of voluntary activity, it is an 
essentially insatiable activity, which recognizes the pres- 
ence of anything limited and determinate, only in order 
to strive beyond this by asking why, or by seeking 
for the origin of the given limitation — in brief, by 
accepting nothing determinate as final. 

The essential characteristics of the subject and the 
object having been thus distinguished by Schelling, his 
whole undertaking in the work that we are sketching, 
depends upon insisting that the self is inevitably the 
synthesis of these two characters, the character of the 
subject and the character of the object. The doctrine thus 
suggested is interpreted by Schelling at every step prag- 
matically, that is, again, in terms of action and types of 
action. The self must know, therefore it must have an 
object for its knowledge. This object cannot come to it 
from without its own nature. That is the presupposition 
of the entire inquiry, and may for argument's sake be 
accepted. The object, then, must be due to the self's own 

117 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
nature. For in knowing, the self is simply to be dealing 
with itself. But the nature of the self as object is pro- 
foundly opposed to the nature of the self as subject. 
The activity whereby the self expresses itself in an ob- 
jective way, is determinate and limited. But as knower 
the self expresses itself by casting down, transcending, 
overcoming determinations. Therefore the self must 
constantly act in a two-fold, and in a conflicting way. 
It must at once do what is necessary in order to present 
to itself objects that are found, that are therefore con- 
ditioned and determinate. It must also deal with these 
objects in terms of tendencies — to thought, to reflection, 
and to the discovery of relationships among objects; 
while these tendencies in their turn will always involve 
a striving towards the transcending of every given limit. 
Schelling, in the spirit of the dialectic method, expresses 
all this in the paradoxical way with which we have now 
become familiar. The self, as he insists, makes itself 
finite in order that it thereby may become and be in- 
finite. In order to be limitless, it defines itself as limited. 
The general spirit of these paradoxes will, I think, be 
fairly comprehensible in the light of the foregoing. The 
whole affair has to be understood in terms of activity. 
In any case the self is a being of essential duality. In 
the well-known modern phrase, one might speak of it as 
a sort of dual personality, one of whose modes of activ- 
ity is essentially opposed to the other. The subjective 
activity, the activity of the knower as knower, is devoted 
to completeness, and to the attainment of a limitless 
self-possession; while the activity of the objective or 
known aspect of the self, is devoted to restraints, limita- 
tions, determination, and finitude in general. If we call 
these two aspects of the self the real and the ideal as- 

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SCHILLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
peets, then the real aspect is the fact-maker, the ideal 
aspect is one which constantly rises above mere facts, 
either idealizing them through its thought, as our indus- 
trial arts and our sciences do, or undertaking in a phil- 
osophical interpretation to view the fact-making process 
as its own expression and embodiment. 

So far, then, Schelling has insisted upon a principle 
which from his point of view tends to define why the 
world endlessly appears to our consciousness not as the 
self but as something else. The knowing process appears 
to us to be in sharp contrast to the existence of the facts 
known. We are right, according to Schelling, in recog- 
nizing this duality. We are wrong in missing the unity 
that lies beneath the whole affair. This unity can only be 
understood from the side of the knower. If we view the 
facts as existing merely because they are required by 
the activity of the knower, and if we view the knower 
as a synthesis of two tendencies which are in an essen- 
tially unsymmetrical relation to each other, so that 
whatever the one tendency demands the other at every 
point directly opposes, then we shall have made a be- 
ginning of comprehending, according to Schelling, the 
situation of the self. 

II. 

But herewith only one aspect, and by no means the 
most fruitful one, of Schelling 's use of the dialectical 
method, comes into sight. The various stages in which, 
in his doctrine, the life of the self appears, are deter- 
mined by another principle than this primal duality. 
This other principle is what one might call the principle 
of reflection. It is implied, to be sure, in the very condi- 
tions that the principle of the duality of the self has just 
expressed. Whatever the self is, that in its wholeness it 

119 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
must reflectively know itself to be. The definition of the 
self implies that, however unconscious it may prove to 
be in any of its special expressions, in its absolute whole- 
ness it possesses no character that is not again known to 
the self. "When Schelling insists upon this fact, a new 
and higher duality in the nature of the self is thereby 
revealed. The self, as we have just seen, possesses what 
one might call its primal duality, the contrast of its ob- 
jective and subjective aspects. It possesses upon any 
stage of its expression what one might further call its 
secondary or derived duality — namely, the duality of 
its expression, and of its reflection. It is indeed one thing 
for the self to possess any activity, or internal conflict, 
or variety, or contrast of aspect ; it is quite another for 
the self to be conscious of this, its own condition, vari- 
ety, or complexity of manifestation. Schelling conse- 
quently insists that since the expression of itself, and its 
consciousness of this expression, are two-fold, and since 
the consciousness of a given form of expression must 
depend upon the objective presence of this form within 
the life of the self, therefore the self must necessarily 
have an unconscious life, an unconscious mode of self- 
expression, in order to possess a conscious life and a 
conscious self-expression. In other words, to say that the 
complete self is completely conscious, inevitably implies 
that the self is also, in its first expression, unconscious. 
As Schelling states the case, ''Whoever is unable to see 
in every activity of the mind the unconscious element, 
whoever recognizes no region outside of consciousness 
as belonging to the self, will be wholly unable to com- 
prehend either how the intelligent activity of the self 
forgets itself in its product or how the artist can be- 
come completely lost in his work. For such a person, who 

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SCHELLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
ignores the unconscious aspect of the self, there exists no 
creative activity but ordinary moral activity; and such 
a person is incapable of seeing how necessity and free- 
dom can be unified in the act of creation. ' ' 

This reference to artistic activity furnishes an illus- 
tration in terms of which, whether one agrees with 
Sehelling or not, one can understand how he is viewing 
the life of the self. The self is indeed a knower. But 
prior to every knowledge is an unconscious possession of 
the object. Knowing is a reflecting upon one's own un- 
conscious creations. Without unconscious activity, no 
conscious activity. Such a character of consciousness is es- 
pecially furnished by the work of genius. The work of 
genius is unconscious in origin, determining for that 
very reason the richer and more surprising consciousness, 
when it is once produced. And so here is the place to re- 
mark once for all that the self for Sehelling is essen- 
tially of the type of a productive genius. It produces un- 
consciously, in order that it shall furnish itself with ma- 
terial for consciousness. Hence, it always meets its own 
products as apparently foreign facts. Its world is its own 
deed; but it is essential to the process of self -conscious- 
ness, that the self should first fail to recognize the 
world as its own deed, and should therefore at the outset 
find it as something external to itself, even in order to 
have the opportunities to win through the comprehend- 
ing, the conquering, and the possessing of this world, its 
own attainments of self -consciousness. 

III. 

On the basis of the principles thus reviewed, Sehelling 
feels warranted in defining a series of expressions of the 
self which, at the close of the book under consideration, 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
he himself recapitulates. I here follow and also expand 
this summary. In the first place the self, that is, not the 
individual self but the self as principle, of knowledge and 
of being, expresses itself through its objective activity, 
and becomes aware of this expression dimly and im- 
perfectly, in the form of immediate experience, of sensa- 
tion, of the simple consciousness that something is. The 
self of immediate experience finds countless facts. By 
what is essentially a single act of self-determination it 
presents to itself a limitless realm of contents, every 
one of which, as first found, appears at this stage en- 
tirely foreign. Limitless this world of facts must be, for 
no single object of immediate experience, no one group 
of sensations would suffice to express the whole self, in 
so far as it is the knower. Foreign every one of these 
facts must seem to the self, in so far as it is knower, 
just because the facts are due to the before-mentioned 
objective activity of the self, which, as we know, is 
opposed to its subjective activity by virtue of the pri- 
mal duality. Not only must these sensations appear for- 
eign to the self; the philosopher also recognizes that in 
their detail they must remain endlessly beyond any phil- 
osophical deduction. Their existence, indeed, is some- 
thing which for the philosopher is an a priori necessity. 
For the self is, and the self therefore must possess its 
objective activity. But in this primal form the objective 
activity must be as arbitrary as it is limitless; and it is 
an entire blunder to suppose that Schelling imagined 
the detail of immediate experience to be deducible a 
priori. What is here to his mind deducible a priori is just 
this primal existence of an opaque and immediate infi- 
nite wealth of data. 

But it is of the nature of the self to recognize the con- 
122 



SCHILLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
trast between its ideal and real aspect. The steps by 
which, in Schelling's account, the self comes to do this, 
need not be further characterized in this summary. It 
is enough to say that, as observer of the given facts, the 
self expresses its ideal activity in a fashion which in- 
cludes these categories which Kant had ascribed to the 
intelligence. These categories, belong, I say, to the other, 
to the ideal aspect of the self 's activity. Like the Kantian 
categories they come into synthesis with immediate ex- 
perience, and the result of this synthesis of real and 
ideal is the world not of immediate experiences but of 
intelligible, phenomenal objects. This is the world of our 
experience of nature. Here the contrast between the ob- 
jective and the ideal aspects of the self still remains. It 
also remains true that upon this stage, despite the syn- 
thesis, the self is conscious of its objects, but not of its 
own deeds, in so far as they are mere deeds. It finds the 
products of its activity; it cannot recognize them as 
merely its own products. Therefore it inevitably views 
them as natural phenomena subject to law. This lawful 
aspect of the facts is, to be sure, determined after the 
Kantian fashion, by the ideal aspect of the activity of 
the self. The phenomena are therefore subject to ra- 
tional law. They are not, like the immediate experiences, 
merely found. They are viewed as constructions, but as 
constructions due to a process of whose nature the self 
is unconscious. Nature presents the intelligible facts to 
the experience of the self. The self recognizes the intelli- 
gence thus present in nature; but it views this intelli- 
gence as a phenomenal, and in so far unexplained fact. 
"Were the self to remain upon this level, it would remain 
eternally unconscious of its genuine ideal activity. It 
would not know itself with any completeness. It would 

123 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

simply construct like a god, but, unconscious of its divin- 
ity, would observe like a child. 

If we view this stage of the expression of the self, 
there is still another aspect to be considered. The true 
self, as we saw, is not any individual ego. But its objec- 
tive world, as now denned, does indeed contain individual 
empirical selves. It does so, because amongst the objec- 
tive facts of which the self, on this stage of its manifes- 
tation, is conscious, is the fact of the contrast between 
the intelligent finding and understanding of facts on the 
one hand, and the existence of the intelligible phenom- 
ena on the other. In other words, at this stage the self 
is not only aware that these phenomena are found, but 
it is also aware that somebody, an observing empirical 
subject, finds them, inquires into them, thinks of them, 
and in so far knows them. In brief, the duality of the 
real and ideal self is, upon this stage, presented as being 
in itself merely a portion of the realm of phenomenal 
facts. Thus the empirical ego, the self as individual, is 
indeed one of the facts found amongst the other phenom- 
ena. As this empirical self, by virtue of the process 
whereby it comes to be observed is found as limited by an 
infinite realm of other facts, Schelling endeavors to 
show that the empirical ego must appear in the realm of 
experience as limited to a special and incomprehensible 
fortune, which in space and time is bound to this place 
and this age. The empirical ego, then, as one of the phe- 
nomena, is as limited as any other of the determinate 
facts of the universe. It is not completely self-possessed. 
It is the creature of nature and of destiny. It is wholly 
subject to fortune. It is unconscious of its origin, and can 
understand this origin only in terms of what it can make 
out from studying the laws of nature. 

124 



SCHBLLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 

IV. 

The whole self, however, in order to be the whole self, 
cannot remain upon this unconscious level. On the other 
hand, this stage of acceptance of facts without conscious- 
ness of their ideal source, is indeed an internally com- 
plete phase of combined consciousness and unconscious- 
ness. Schelling, as you see, believes that he can under- 
stand why the complete self must appear on this stage, 
which is essentially the stage denned by the Kantian de- 
duction of the categories. He is also sure that nothing 
that can occur upon this level furnishes any reason why 
the intelligence should pass beyond it to a higher level of 
consciousness, while, on the other hand, the nature of 
the true self essentially demands that this stage of con- 
sciousness should be transcended. To what tendency of 
the self, then, is due the power to reach a stage of reflec- 
tion higher than the one just defined? 

Hereupon in his development of his doctrine Schell- 
ing lays stress upon a consideration which Fichte had 
already developed in those of his early works in which 
he deals with ethical problems. That stage of reflection 
in which the self becomes able, not merely to understand 
the intelligible character of phenomena, but to view its 
deeds as its own, and so to make a beginning in compre- 
hending its ideal activities, is attainable only through a 
social consciousness. Left to itself, without a variety of 
inter-related selves, as an essential part of its life, the 
pure self would be intelligent but unconscious of the 
source of its intelligence. True self-consciousness, that is 
consciousness in which the relations of the subjective 
and objective activities become explicit is possible only 
for a social being. This thought, momentous for the whole 
later development of idealism, is emphasized by Schell- 

125 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
ing at a critical stage of the work which we are consider- 
ing in a very interesting manner. The possibility that 
the self should express itself in the variety of individual 
forms is suggested by that view of the nature of indi- 
viduality which I have just very summarily indicated. 
In observing its world of phenomena, the self observes 
its own ideal activities as themselves phenomena only 
in so far as these activities are concerned with the ob- 
serving, the finding, the knowing of objects. That is, the 
empirical ego is first known merely as the knower of a 
foreign world, to which he comes as the intelligent on- 
looker. But that the empirical ego is an expression of the 
very activity to which the whole world of phenomena is 
due, this fact cannot become explicit for the self, in so 
far as the self remains upon the stage of an intelligent 
observation of phenomena. The empirical ego is, however, 
as we saw, an observer of fragmentary and determinate 
sets of phenomenal facts, appears on the scene at a par- 
ticular point of space and time, is like any other phe- 
nomenal fact, due to an incomprehensible limitation, and 
is immersed in an infinite realm of natural facts, to 
whose laws his own fortunes are subject. Individuality 
therefore appears in indefinitely numerous and various 
natural forms. None of these forms completely display 
what the self is. And in so far as they are phenomena, 
none of these individual and empirical ego-phenomena 
can display the true activity of the self. 

But all these finite selves are also possessed of 
the truly ideal, of the genuinely constructive subjec- 
tive activity of the self. Yet in no one of them can this 
activity be observed as a phenomenon. In each of them 
it is present merely as the essence of their individual 
will, as the constructive principle that determines their 

126 



SCHELLING 'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
lives. But now, as Schelling insists, when these selves 
come into mutual contact, when the act of one, becomes 
a significant fact for the other, each of these expressions 
of the self wins from the contact an entirely new, a 
social sense, of the meaning of his own nature. I become 
aware of my own activity as mine only by virtue of the 
fact that my activity is in some respect limited or hin- 
dered by what I recognize as the act of another self. In 
other words, the higher reflection which characterizes 
the moral being, the reflection which enables one to say 
this is my deed, is a reflection made possible only by the 
mutual relations of various selves. The sense of this doc- 
trine, which Schelling derived from Fichte, and which 
he here expresses with great definiteness, is the same as 
that which with reference to recent investigations Pro- 
fessor J. M. Baldwin and I have emphasized, each 
in his own way, as a matter of the empirical psychology 
of self-consciousness. One cannot say that Schelling 's ac- 
count does very much to rid the process described by 
him of its distinctly empirical appearance. As a fact, a 
reflective self -consciousness is always accompanied by the 
recognition of others than myself. I acknowledge another 
self beside me, and in doing so I become aware of my- 
self. Schelling insists upon this point. He attempts to 
show, in the way just indicated, that a variety of individ- 
ual selfhood actually belongs to the modes of self-expres- 
sion which the self finds in its world. But the recogni- 
tion of one individual by another individual appears in 
his account as an irreducible fact. This fact is in gen- 
eral necessitated by the requirement that the self should 
come to consciousness of its own activity. And such 
consciousness actually occurs in no other way. Self- 
consciousness, as, in agreement with Professor J. M. 

127 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
Baldwin, I have stated the case, is what one might call a 
social contrast effect. You know yourself by contrast with 
the other man, or by contrast with many other men, with 
God, or with your own ideal self. And we learn self -con- 
sciousness through our social relations. It is at all events 
characteristic of the idealism whose fortunes we are fol- 
lowing, to lay great stress upon this essential feature of 
the reflective self-consciousness. In the large perspective 
of Schilling's doctrine of the self, the stage of conscious- 
ness which he calls intelligence, and which we have 
reviewed in the foregoing, has been characterized by 
profound unconsciousness of its own active character. 
Intelligence observes, observes the world of immediate 
experiences, and of intelligible law. It categorizes. It de- 
fines. It actually sees itself in all it sees ; but it sees itself 
as foreign, as nature, as phenomena. To be sure it in one 
respect goes further than this. Since this, its whole intel- 
ligent life, after all depends upon the conflict of real 
and ideal activities, and since the ideal activity, the con- 
structions of the intelligence, are everywhere limited, 
determined, by the phenomena, the intelligence observes 
itself as present under the form of empirical individ- 
uality, bound to an organic life, limited to this or to that 
part of the world. And in so far the intelligence is indeed 
psychological in its interests. It observes mental phenom- 
ena, and in so far it inevitably observes various empirical 
egoes, various individual types of experience. But in all 
this intelligence does not know that it is observing its 
own constructive activity. In the social life, and only in 
the social life, however, does the self awaken to the re- 
flection that its deeds are its own ; that is, that its ideals 
are the source of objects, are productive of facts. 

With the reflective process which thus becomes possi- 
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SCHILLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
ble, the self begins to be aware of what it is, namely, a 
creator. Its knowing becomes for it also a constructive 
activity, a creative principle. With this it is indeed at 
first remote enough from knowing itself to be the crea- 
tive principle of its whole world. Its constructive or 
ideal activity now comes to its consciousness only at first 
in the form of the deeds of one individual over against 
other individuals. It enters the practical world where 
action rather than the intelligent comprehension of facts 
forms the central interest. But herewith the immediate 
result is, of course, not the reduction of its world to unity, 
nor the complete recognition of its own unity as a world 
creator, but an increase of variety. The various individ- 
ual selves of the practical world are primarily subjects 
and not objects, ideal beings rather than phenomena, 
self-determining rather than determinate, free rather 
than subject to law. But on the other hand they are 
bound together, they are inter-related by the fact 
that they possess the realm of intelligence in common. 
They are many in so far as they are also able to act upon 
one another, for through their interaction they are able 
to recognize each other 's existence. And their interaction 
implies a recognition of common subjects, that is, a recog- 
nition that the same world of phenomena is common to 
them all. The world of phenomena thus gets a renewed, an 
increased grade of objectivity. One of the principal rea- 
sons why common sense generally refuses to view phe- 
nomena merely as objects for a subject, is that since 
phenomena are common to all the various intelligent 
subjects, they appear independent of any one individual 
subject, and so are taken to be real, apart from knowl- 
edge. As Schelling puts it, the world of the intelligence 
becomes for the first time a real world in so far as it 

129 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
exists for the many subjects. The presupposition for 
every concrete activity of the subjects is therefore this, 
that their acts should conform to the laws of nature. 
Whatever they do belongs also to the realm of phe- 
nomena. Since they are also aware of their deeds as 
their own, they thus become conscious of a certain pre- 
established harmony between nature and the human will. 
But this preestablished harmony is itself something sub- 
ject to determinate limitations. Human freedom is pos- 
sible only in particular deeds at certain times, in par- 
ticular places. Every man's activity is limited. Every 
deed of an individual presupposes the whole objective 
world process in which he finds his own phenomenal 
place. The position of the free agents is therefore essen- 
tially paradoxical. They express the deeper, the ideal 
aspects of the self. But they do this in a way which 
makes every one of their deeds appear as a mere incident 
in the world process, and as an expression of a human 
nature whose natural causation can only be denned by 
referring it for its source to the whole of the past his- 
tory of the world. 

However, reflection once established, the ideal activi- 
ties of the free agents become themselves the topic of 
mutual criticism and of self-estimate. The moral con- 
sciousness arises and defines the ideal of the ideals, the 
principle according to which all ideal activity ought to 
be guided. And this is the principle of the complete and 
free expression of the selves, as the life of one self. Thus 
at last the ideal principle of the self comes in its unity 
before consciousness. And thus the contrast between free 
expression of the self as subject, and the natural limita- 
tions of human nature as the objective aspect of the life 
of the self, becomes a central fact. Hereupon Schelling 

130 



SCHILLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
tells us that it is this fact which forms the topic and the 
interest of universal history. The history of humanity is 
the tale of the contest between fortune and free will, and 
on the other hand between the caprice of the individual 
and the destiny of humanity. The problem of history in 
its most general form is this. The ideal activities of free 
agents constitute in their unity the only expression that 
the ideal activity of the self can ever consciously get. 
In so far as the ideal activity of the self expressed itself 
simply in the construction of natural phenomena, it was 
unconscious. It comes to consciousness only in human 
beings, and in them only in so far as they are aware of 
their free choice in their cooperation and in their con- 
flicts with other human beings. But since the ideal activ- 
ity of the self is to be completely expressed in the world 
of life as a whole, it must be the destiny of the world to 
unite somehow the necessity that the ideal should be 
wholly realized, and should be realized in the entire 
course of human history as a whole — to reconcile this 
necessity, I say, with the fact that the only expression 
which the ideal can ever attain, is its expression through 
the free choices of individuals — choices which, as free, 
need not be ideal at all in any but the capricious sense 
of the momentary and perhaps wayward deed. 

V. 

Thus then, for Schelling, the world problem, which at 
the outset of his discussion was merely the problem as to 
how the self is related to its world of experience, now 
becomes the problem which is determined by three fac- 
tors: (1) the natural process of the phenomenal world, 
(2) the free will process of individuals, (3) the ethical 
or absolute ideal, which in demanding that the self 

131 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
should be completely expressed, and expressed in con- 
scious form, demands that the natural destiny of hu- 
manity should in the long run so overrule the individ- 
ual caprices, that an ideal result of history, an ideal 
evolution of the ideal, should be the net result of the 
life struggle of humanity. The problem once thus stated, 
Schelling in a decidedly dramatic climax of his discus- 
sion, solves it by two considerations, taking him into 
regions quite remote from the philosophy of Fichte. 
You will remember that, at the outset of our account of 
Schelling, during the last lecture, we first met the self 
in a problematic guise, which for the moment threatened 
to result in the total failure of our enterprise to become 
anything but a thought of Hindoo mysticism. The self 
as knower was to be simply identical with its own object. 
Until we observed with Schelling the unsymmetrical re- 
lation between the objective and the subjective activities, 
we could see for the moment no way out of the empty 
phraseology of the assertion, "I am I." The self ap- 
peared to be complete at the instant when, being its own 
empty object, it was nothing at all. But in any case the 
self then appears to us as a certain identity, whose nature 
is so far undefinable. Having carried his investigation 
through such elaborate complications, having distin- 
guished conscious and unconscious activity, having so 
sharply distinguished object and subject, individual con- 
sciousness and true self, ideal and real aspects, intelli- 
gence and free will, nature and society, humanity, the 
destiny of humanity, and the ideal of humanity, Schell- 
ing now suddenly and in characteristic fashion returns 
from all these varieties to an assertion of the original 
identity of the self with the self, of the Objective with 
the subjective, as not only the beginning, but also the 

132 



SCHELLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
end of the entire undertaking. The principle which we 
have been calling the self, is a principle so far of self- 
differentiation. We are now reminded that the uncon- 
scious and the conscious natures of this self are essen- 
tially identical, that the self, although endlessly individ- 
ual, has also been, throughout this process, essentially 
impersonal, indifferent to every one of its own distinc- 
tions, except as this distinction should be of use in illus- 
trating its own identity and self-possession of nature. 
All then is the self; but the self, what is the principle 
at the very heart of its nature? Schelling again replies, 
"The identity of its conscious and unconscious proc- 
esses." This identity does indeed demand a variety; in 
fact all the varieties that we have been following. But 
the identity requires these varieties merely as its form 
of appearance. It is by itself deeper than all the varieties. 
The identity, then, of conscious and of unconscious 
processes, of objective and of subjective expressions, of 
real and of ideal activities, of the world and of the goal 
of the world, of humanity and of the destiny of humanity 
and of the purpose of humanity, this identity is after 
all not only what we have presupposed, but as Schelling 
insists, it is what we have necessarily found as includ- 
ing, demanding, and unifying all these varieties. The 
Identity, then, may well be called the ' ' Absolute ; ' ' and 
Schelling hereupon so calls it. The Absolute is precisely 
that which the self throughout the whole development 
has been trying to be. The Absolute is, as Schelling now 
paradoxically maintains, neither the subject nor the ob- 
ject, but essentially, as he puts it, the "Indifference," or 
as one might better say, the essential unity of both. Its 
form is that of subject over against object, of pursuit 
over against ideal, of deed over against fact, of attain- 

133 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
ment over against finitude and conflict. But in itself it is 
rather the center toward which all these differences 
point. Its root is in unconsciousness, its flower is in hu- 
man effort. Its nature completely unites and identifies 
conscious and unconscious principle. 

A certain illustration and aid in interpreting this 
somewhat obscure doctrine is furnished by one more 
feature which Schelling introduces at the close of his 
discussion. The highest apparition of the Absolute, apart 
from philosophical reflection, is, he tells us, not nature, 
not man, not moral activity, not human history, but art, 
and its producer, namely, genius. An artistic genius is 
the nearest to the complete incarnation of the Absolute 
that we can expect to find. Art is the fullest expression 
of the absolute identity of conscious and unconscious 
activity that our experience furnishes. In the work of 
art we find that whose origin lies deep hidden in the un- 
conscious. But it expresses a meaning, when it is of the 
highest artistic type, which an infinity of conscious ac- 
tivity would be needed to exhaust. The work of art is a 
perfect synthesis of objective production, with subjec- 
tive significance. It is a product of nature, namely of the 
nature of the artist, and so it is in perfect harmony with 
the entire nature of things. In consequence, it has all the 
characters which the intelligence has found in the ra- 
tional order of the phenomenal world. On the one hand, 
it has ideal values, that is, it stands in such relation to 
our present conscious activity as the moral ideal stands, 
for it is the goal of an endless attainment. On the other, 
it is the ideal present, completely embodied, finished, 
found. Thus it brings before us, as completely as may be, 
the identity, the unity, of all the various elements which 
experience and action, science and life, subject and ob- 

134 



SCHELLING'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 
ject divide. We have sought, then, the self; we have 
found the Absolute; and the best incarnation of the 
Absolute is art. 

Such is an outline of this distinctly romantic and 
frequently fantastic work of Schelling's genius, a work 
which Schelling himself could not well regard as final, 
and which I have thus expounded not because it is my 
purpose in this course to discuss either the evolution or 
the later forms of Schelling's philosophy but because we 
find herein the illustration of very notable motives of 
this whole idealistic movement. 



135 



LECTURE VI. 
HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES. 



IN my series of illustrations of the early idealism I 
now come to a work which is in many ways the most 
remarkable production of German philosophy be- 
tween 1790 and 1810. 

The Phaenomenologie des Geistes, despite its close re- 
lations to the general movement of thought at the time, 
contains a degree of originality both of conception and 
of execution, which sets it above any single work either 
of Fichte or of Schelling. In the series of its author's 
productions, it again stands in a very marked place, be- 
ing distinctly the most original and individual of all 
Hegel's works. And, despite its notoriously barbarous 
style, which has made it the horror of the recent German 
historians of literature, it has very close and important 
relations to the literary movement of the time ; and were 
it composed in a language which ordinary students of 
literature could comprehend, it would undoubtedly oc- 
cupy a very notable place in the annals of the literature 
of the romantic period. As the product of Hegel's early 
manhood it has a greater freedom of imagination and of 
constructive power than belongs to his later works. In its 
comments upon political and social problems, it shows 
indeed the personal temperament which always remained 
characteristic of Hegel, but it lacks the somewhat pedan- 

136 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 

tic political conservatism which marks the treatises of the 
last decade of Hegel 's life, composed when he was profes- 
sor at Berlin, during what has been called by his enemies, 
his "bureaucratic" period. Because it has become cus- 
tomary for the modern historians of philosophy to judge 
Hegel by his later works, and because the political con- 
servatism of his Berlin period and the dictatorial manner 
that he then assumed rendered him unpopular to the 
generation of German liberals whose influence culmi- 
nated in the year 1848, the Phaenomenologie has re- 
mained unduly neglected. Few of the textbooks of the 
history of philosophy give it much more than a per- 
functory summary. Haym in his book Hegel und Seine 
Zeit discusses the work, but with an austere lack of 
sympathy for what was most characteristic about it. 
Windelband in his History of Modern Philosophy speaks 
of it much more sympathetically, but characterizes it, not 
altogether unjustly, as the most difficult treatise in the 
history of philosophy. Difficult the Phaenomenologie 
certainly is, even if one comes to it in the right spirit. 
The customary aversion to the work has, however, been 
partly due to a failure to consider it in the right relation 
to the literary and social background characteristic of 
the time when it was produced. In only a few instances, 
so far as I know, have the critics of the German literature 
of that time seen the interest that attaches to the Phae- 
nomenologie from the purely literary side. Of all the brief 
summaries of the book in the histories of philosophy, the 
sketch which Zeller gives in his Geschichie der Deutschen 
Philosophie seit Leibnitz is to my mind the best. The 
account of Rosenkranz in his Life of Hegel is decidedly 
valuable, although I feel that Rosenkranz himself regards 
the book a little too much from the point of view of its 

137 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

relation to Hegel 's later system. It ought, I think, rather 
to be taken first of all as an expression of a very remarka- 
ble stage in the development of German idealism; it 
ought to be viewed as what it is, a very marvelous union 
of a rigid technical method of analysis of problems on the 
one hand, with a remarkably free use of literary imagi- 
nation and historical comments upon the other. This 
union is such as to make the work of distinctly unstable 
value for systematic philosophy. The critic who expects 
to find logical formulations and metaphysical doctrines, 
and who in fact finds many such in the book, is misled 
in his judgment concerning those portions of the work 
where Hegel indulges in the portrayal of more or less 
idealized characterizations of historical types, of individ- 
uals, and of social movements. As these characterizations 
have a relation to the logical and metaphysical doctrines 
which is not at first sight easy to understand, the critic 
is likely to find these passages of character study simply 
incomprehensible, or to regard them as wayward inter- 
ruptions of the logical development, or even, worst of all, 
as absurd efforts on Hegel's part to deduce a priori the 
history of man, and the psychological development of 
human character, from the categories of his system. On 
the other hand, the student who turns to the book with 
the interest of the historian of literature, is terrified by 
the technical vocabulary, by the strange array of cate- 
gories, by the evidences that the whole is intended to 
illustrate, and in some way to prove, some system regard- 
ing the universe. If the Phaenomenologie be viewed, 
therefore, with reference to the announced purpose of the 
author, which is to furnish an introduction to his forth- 
coming system of philosophy, the work must certainly be 
called a failure. Few or none of its contemporary read- 

138 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 
ers could have foreseen what was to be the outcome of 
the doctrines regarding the real world which were indi- 
cated in his introduction. Few would have felt them- 
selves introduced to anything. For it is indeed true that 
the technical aspect of the work needs considerable ex- 
planation in the light of Hegel's later work. On the other 
hand, nobody amongst Hegel's contemporaries could 
have been much enlightened by the untechnical portions 
of the work, because these were embedded in the obscure 
vocabulary and in the suggestions of the metaphysical 
doctrines. 

Despite all these things, when once we undertake to 
consider the Phaenomenologie upon its own presupposi- 
tions, we discover a great deal that remains permanently 
interesting. The interest is of two sorts. In the first place 
the Phaenomenologie is a study of human nature, as it is 
expressed in various individual and social types. From 
this point of view the title which William James has 
employed for his book, The Varieties of Religious Ex- 
perience, could well be adapted to characterize Hegel's 
treatise. It is so far a book describing, in serial order, 
some varieties of experience which, in Hegel's opinion, 
are at once characteristic of the general evolution of 
higher mental life, and are examples of the transition 
from common sense naivete to philosophical reflec- 
tion and to the threshold of an idealistic system. The 
choice of these varieties of experience, of these types of 
character, and of social development, is for us today 
somewhat arbitrary. There can be no doubt that this 
choice is distinctly due to the state of politics and of lit- 
erature and of European life generally in the years 
when Hegel wrote this book, namely in the time just be- 
fore the battle of Jena. Had Hegel written it at the close 

139 



LECTUKES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
of his career, during the time of the political reaction 
which preceded 1830, he would unquestionably have 
chosen a different group of types. Yet there is no doubt 
that the human types which he actually portrays in the 
work are significant, are characteristic of great prob- 
lems both of personal life and of society, and despite the 
somewhat arbitrary array in which Hegel presents these 
types, and despite the extremely severe criticism to 
which he frequently subjects them, the work done is of 
permanent importance and interest. In the second place, 
the interest of the book is in part truly philosophical. 
It does not fulfil its purpose of easily introducing the 
learner to a philosophical idealism, but it contains a very 
thoroughgoing application of the dialectical method, and 
a very important series of reflections on the problems of 
idealistic thought. 

My own present effort to give some hints of the con- 
tents of the Phaenomenologie, will endeavor to be just to 
both these interests. The actual waywardness with which 
Hegel combines metaphysical analysis and free portrayal 
of types of human character, the unquestionable diffi- 
culty of the whole discussion, the unsatisfactoriness of 
the entire argument, viewed as a systematic presentation 
of idealistic doctrines, the arbitrariness of this singular 
union of imaginative construction, psychological por- 
trayal, and metaphysical reasoning — all this I shall rec- 
ognize ; and yet I shall try to indicate how significant the 
book is, when rightly taken. In order to view it fairly, 
you have to treat it, I think, as a whole genus of highly 
original literary and speculative works and authors 
should be treated. It is with the Phaenomenologie as it is 
with Schopenhauer, with Nietzsche, with Walt "Whitman, 
with Browning. In dealing with such original and oc- 

140 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 

casionally crabbed instances of genius, people are far too 
often divided into the blind followers who worship the 
master or his book, because of the eccentricities of both, 
and the blind opponents who can see nothing but bar- 
barism or waywardness, because this type of genius hap- 
pens to express itself in unconventional fashion. People 
usually think that you must be either a worshipper or an 
opponent — perhaps in the latter case an out-and-out de- 
spiser — of a Browning, of a Walt Whitman, or in our 
own day of a Tolstoi. For my part I think that such 
writers and their works must be treated with the same 
freedom which they themselves exemplify. They worship 
nobody, and stand for themselves. Let us follow their 
example, so far as they themselves are concerned. In the 
presence of the wayward, I too may be free to judge in 
my own individual way. On the other hand, it is folly not 
to recognize how much such people and such work may 
mean to us, if we learn to appreciate them, not as finali- 
ties, but as individual expressions of highly significant 
life and thought. 

II. 
In the case of the Phaenomenologie, we must approach 
the work by reminding ourselves of the historical posi- 
tion which it occupies. The noteworthy expressions of the 
early idealism were formulated by a group of men most 
of whom were at some time at the University of Jena. 
Here Fichte taught between 1794 and the time when his 
famous controversy, due to a charge of atheism made 
against him, drove him from the place. Here Schelling 's 
early works were produced. Hegel, who was five years 
older than Schelling and who had been a fellow-student 
of Schelling at Tubingen, was thirty years old in 1800. 
In this year he came, after a long period of preparation 

141 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
during which he had lived largely as a private tutor, to 
the University of Jena as Privat-Docent. He was at first 
understood to be a disciple of Schelling, and while he 
never admitted the fact, his early publications were for 
a time distinctly upon Schelling 's side. In company 
with Schelling, Hegel for a time edited a philosophical 
journal. In 1806, the battle of Jena put a temporary stop 
to Hegel's opportunities at the University. In 1807, the 
Phaenomenologie, considerably delayed in publication by 
the troubles of the time, made its appearance. For some 
years thereafter Hegel was obliged to engage in other 
than academic occupations. Not until 1812 did he gain 
a place as professor of philosophy at Heidelberg, where 
he remained until his transfer to Berlin. The Phaenome- 
nologie is, thus, subsequent to the publication of Schell- 
ing 's principal useful works. It presupposes readers ac- 
quainted with the problems of recent idealism; and as 
already indicated, it treats even highly trained students 
with great severity. With very little explanation, Hegel 
at once introduces a distinctly new and decidedly com- 
plex philosophical vocabulary, whose meaning one is to 
discover mainly from the uses to which he applies it — 
his own deliberate opinion being that philosophical ter- 
minology can only be perfectly defined by means of con- 
siderations which can first occur to mind only at that 
point in the portrayal system where the vocabulary 
comes to be needed. Moreover, what the German histo- 
rians of literature have called the barbarism of Hegel's 
language was due partly, as I understand, to his Suabian 
habits of speech, and partly to his efforts to translate 
all philosophical terminology that could be so treated out 
of Latin and Greek into a German vocabulary — an un- 
dertaking in which he showed a characteristic awkward- 

142 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 
ness. Pedagogically speaking, Hegel is distinctly austere. 
The learner shall adjust himself to the master. The mas- 
ter does comparatively little to smooth the learner's way. 

The philosophical presuppositions of the book which 
the reader is to have in mind, he now superficially knows. 
The world of reality is to be defined in terms of what- 
ever constitutes the true nature and foundation of the 
self. The categories of thought are to be deduced in the 
double sense with which we are now familiar. That is, 
one is to undertake what Kant attempted in his deduc- 
tion of the categories, i.e., the proof that phenomena 
must in form be subject to the laws of thought. One must 
also undertake to show by a systematic development, 
what the forms of thought are. The book intends that the 
reader shall be interested in such an undertaking and 
shall be in general prepared to investigate the problem 
of life and of nature from this idealistic point of view. 
The method of the Phaenomenologie involves the demand 
that the reader should be pretty well acquainted with 
modern philosophical literature. Hegel does not cite his 
predecessors by name. He persistently uses the form of 
mere allusion; and since many of his allusions are to 
essays and discussions which are no longer in the fore- 
front of our historical consciousness, we are constantly 
baffled in our efforts to see the force of the allusions 
themselves. 

Meanwhile Hegel is convinced of the fundamental im- 
portance of the dialectical method. In his mind, this 
method has become much more systematic and elabo- 
rate than it was in the hands of Fichte, decidedly more 
conscious and explicit as an instrument of philosophical 
thought than it was for Schelling. In the Phaenome- 
nologie the dialectical method appears from the start in 

143 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
what I have before called its pragmatic form. The anti- 
thetical stages, the contradictory phases through which 
imperfect thought passes, and inevitably passes, on its 
way towards truth, are to be viewed in this book as con- 
stituting a series of stages which are represented both in 
the history of science and in the history of civilization. 
For philosophy the dialectical method will be the por- 
trayal of the nature and development of the thinking 
process. But this thinking process will go through a 
series of phases corresponding to the successive stages 
of various processes, such as occur in the lives of individ- 
uals and of nations. As these stages are represented in 
personal and in social life, they will, in general, be bound 
up with forms of activity and of emotion, with human 
passions and conflicts. What in the logical philosophy 
appears as a conflict of categories, of points of view, of 
theses and antitheses, will appear in human life as a con- 
flict of moral and of social tendencies, of opinions for 
which men make sacrifices, upon which they stake their 
fortunes. The conflicts of philosophical ideas will thus 
appear as a kind of shadowy repetition, or representa- 
tion, of the struggles of humanity for life and for light. 
The thesis that history itself is a dialectical process, gets 
its relative justification from that dialectical character 
of the will upon which I have insisted in previous lec- 
tures. It is easy to say that in Hegel's treatment of his 
ethico-logical parallelism, as one might call it, he becomes 
a formalist, and often appears to falsify history by in- 
terpreting its catastrophes and its warfare in terms of 
the categories of his S3 r stem. But this offense, in so far 
as it can be charged against Hegel, is much less present 
in the Phaenonienologic than in his much later lectures 
on the philosophy of history. For the Phacnomcnologie 

144 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEI8TE8 
uses so much freer a method of illustrating philosophy 
by history, pretends so little to being a literal reproduc- 
tion of past events, undertakes so obviously the task of 
merely expressing in its own way the spirit, the general 
sense, the outline of historical processes, that Hegel is 
here much less definitely committed than he was later to 
the theory that history is a literal expression in life of 
the categories of the philosophical logic. 

On the contrary, the Phaenomenologie unites logic and 
history rather by means of a reducing of the thinking 
process to pragmatic terms than by means of a false 
translation of real life into the abstract categories of 
logic. It becomes manifest throughout the work that, for 
Hegel, thought is inseparable from will, that logic exists 
only as the logic of life, and the truth, although in a 
sense that we shall hereafter consider absolute, exists 
only in the form of a significant life process, in which 
the interests and purposes both of humanity and of the 
Absolute express themselves. The deduction of the cate- 
gories of the thinking process, in so far as it is suggested 
in this work, is dialectical. It is based upon the method 
of antithesis, a method possessing for Hegel pragmatic 
significance and illustrating the way in which men live 
as well as the way in which men must think. 

I have indicated in a most general way the philosophi- 
cal interest to which the Phaenomenologie appeals — an 
interest in the new idealism, in the Kantian deduction 
of the categories, in the use of the dialectical method as 
the truly philosophical method, and in the relation of 
philosophy to life, of thought and will. But for this very 
reason Hegel conceived, as he planned this work, that an 
introduction to philosophy might take the form of a por- 
trayal of a series of stages, that is, varieties of conscious- 

145 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

ness and of life, through which the mind proceeds as it 
passes from its natural or primal conditions towards 
philosophical insight. These stages Hegel is disposed to 
view as at once philosophically necessary and capable 
of historical illustration in the lives of individuals and 
of society. The parallelism of logic and of history, of the 
dialectical process and of the evolution of humanity, ap- 
pears to him of service as aiding in the introduction of 
the learner to philosophy. That in working out the 
theory of this parallelism Hegel is unsuccessful, that the 
unprepared reader is confounded rather than led to a 
correct appreciation of his philosophy — this is simply 
Hegel's fortune as a teacher. It is his personal character- 
istic always to make a learner's first impression of his 
doctrines as puzzling as possible. He can enlighten you 
only after he has first, like a severe elder relative, long 
worried you. The actual view regarding the nature of 
this parellelism becomes clear only to one who knows 
more about the spirit of the Hegelian doctrine than the 
first readers of this book could have known. 

Granting, however, that Hegel's system can be intro- 
duced through a study of this parallelism of logic and 
real life, the first problem to be solved by Hegel lay in 
the fact that the forms or types of consciousness which 
he wishes to portray appear to him to be in part stages 
which the moral development of an individual person 
will exemplify, and in part stages which the evolution 
of society embodies. In our sketch of Schelling 
we have already seen how, according to that philos- 
opher, the stages of self-expression of the principle 
called the self, are partly individual, partly social, and 
partly impersonal. Hegel had learned from Schelling to 
view the expressions of the self as indeed a series of 

146 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 
stages, logically connected, but differing in the way in 
which they emphasize impersonal and personal, indi- 
vidual and social types of consciousness. Hegel is de- 
cidedly less interested than Schelling in a philosoph- 
ical comprehension of external nature, his own very 
vast erudition mainly related to literary, philosophical, 
historical, and social aspects of human life, so it is nat- 
ural that his Phaenomenologie should be built up espe- 
cially on the lines suggested by what he takes to be logi- 
cally significant forms and series of personal and of 
social experience. It is a natural device to present the in- 
dividual and the social types in two divisions, united 
by the fact that the individual types as such are re- 
peated, although upon higher and more significant levels, 
when the individual is viewed as he ought to be, namely, 
in conjunction with the social order with which every 
phase of individual consciousness is always in fact con- 
nected. 

III. 

But still another and different consideration has to be 
mentioned in order that the structure of the Phaenome- 
nologie be understood. This consideration has been singu- 
larly overlooked by most of those who have given an ac- 
count of the work. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister had 
made prominent at that time a type of romance which is 
now no longer familiar to our readers of current litera- 
ture, although it is a type which is not without its imi- 
tations in English literature. Readers of former periods 
were well acquainted with the form in question as it ap- 
peared in several different European literatures. What 
I have in mind may still better be suggested if I ask you 
to compare Wilhelm Meister with Carlyle's Sartor 

147 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

Resartus. I refer to the romance whose hero is interest- 
ing to us principally as a type, not so much as an ele- 
mentally attractive personality. It readily lent itself to 
the didactic purpose, and therefore from the romance 
of this type to the philosophical treatise there is an 
indefinitely graded series of intermediate forms, such as 
Sartor Resartus suggests to our minds. Such romances 
are prone to lay stress upon some significant process of 
evolution, through which the hero passes. He himself 
represents a type of personal experience, or development 
of character. The effect of such work is rather to present 
to us the world, or some portion of it, as seen from a 
typical or characteristic, and in so far personal point 
of view, rather than to interest us directly in the 
passions or in the tragedy or comedy of the hero's life. 
In the German literature of this period numerous in- 
stances appear, of various grades of importance. Novalis 
in his Heinrich von Ofterdingen undertook to sketch 
the career of a typical romantic poet, such as Novalis 
himself hoped to be. The romance remained unfinished. 
It is said to have been one of a series which Novalis 
planned. Each one of the series was to present a special 
type of personality. In the mentioned romance, as you 
see, the interest lies in the fact that the hero is the ideal 
poet, and less in the fact that he is an individual of ele- 
mental significance such as Macbeth or Romeo might pos- 
sess. Art, to be sure, is always of the typical, but in work 
of this kind the type is chosen in cold blood, and the hero 
is created to fill, as it were, a somewhat abstractly de- 
fined order or demand. In art of the other sort, the hero 
is an individual, and becomes a type merely by virtue of 
the inherent and perhaps unconscious requirements of 
the artist's genius. Goethe's Faust is an individual 

148 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 

first and a type only as a result of the greatness of the 
creation. But Wilhelm Meister is rather a typical proc- 
ess of natural development than primarily a personal- 
ity. Ludwig Tieck had more than once used the form of 
the type-romance, created to present an illustration of 
a plan of development, or of decadence. Thus his early 
work, William Lovell, is on the whole a type-ro- 
mance. Now under the influence of the literary habits of 
the time, it unquestionably occurred to Hegel to make his 
portrayal of what he calls the experience of the Geist, 
or typical mind of the race, something that could be nar- 
rated in a story, or in a connected series of stories in 
which typical developments are set forth. The Phaenom- 
enologie therefore appears on the one hand as a sort of 
biography of the world-spirit — a biography in which in- 
stead of concrete events one has only the comedies and 
tragedies of the inner life, and these depicted rather as 
fortunes which occur to ideas, to purposes, if you choose, 
to categories, than as occurrences in the ordinary world. 
The name world-spirit, Weltgeist, which Hegel some- 
times uses, and which became current in the later ideal- 
istic literature, means much the same as the term self 
which we have employed throughout this discussion, in 
a universal sense. Only the term "world-spirit" is ex- 
plicitly allegorical. It refers to the self, viewed as the 
subject to whom historical or other human events and 
processes occur, so that it is as if this world-spirit lived its 
life by means of, or suffered and enjoyed its personal 
fortunes through these historical and individual proc- 
esses. The world-spirit, then, is the self viewed metaphor- 
ically as the wanderer through the course of history, the 
incarnate god to whom the events of human life may be 
supposed to happen, or if you will the divinity in dis- 

149 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

guise, like Wotan the Wanderer. The term is never a 
technically philosophical term. But it is very frequently 
employed in this somewhat metaphorical sense by 
philosophers. 

Well, the Phaenomenologie may be viewed, then, as the 
biography of the world-spirit; and somewhat in this 
sense Hegel conceives the plan of all except the intro- 
ductory portion of his work. This life of the world-spirit 
consists, however, of a series of what we have called 
stages, and these may be compared to different incarna- 
tions or transmigrations, as it were, of the world-spirit — 
an interpretation which Hegel never, I think, explicitly 
mentions, although one passage in his preface strongly 
suggests the thought. The passage uses, with regard to 
the world-spirit, Hamlet 's word addressed to his father's 
ghost: "What, ho, old mole, canst work in the earth so 
fast?" For so, says Hegel, one is sometimes tempted to 
say on observing through what toilsome and underground 
pathways of hard-won experience the spirit seems to find 
its way through the history of humanity to the light of 
reason. A frequent suggestion of this interpretation is 
furnished by the fact that Hegel is often describing the 
typical point of view which we know has received, or is 
receiving, its expression solely through some one person, 
or class of persons, whose life or lives are in the natural 
world wholly confined to the expression of this one phase 
of consciousness. Such individuals cannot rise above just 
that stage. Nevertheless, at the close of such a stage, 
Hegel speaks of "consciousness" as passing on to the 
next higher stage, which is such cases may be represented 
in the human world as we know it by wholly different 
individuals. The metaphor of a transmigration becomes, 
under these circumstances, almost inevitable as we try 

150 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTE8 
to follow what happens. The term used by Hegel for 
these various typical stages in the progress of conscious- 
ness, or of the world-spirit, is Gestalten des Bewussteins, 
that is, forms of consciousness. These forms, however, are 
often sharply individuated, treated as if they were per- 
sons — heroes such as are portrayed in Wilhelm Meister 
or in Sartor Resartus. They have their fortunes, their 
confident beginning, when they are sure of themselves 
and of their own truth, their conflicts, their enemies, 
their tragedy, or on occasion their comedy of contradic- 
tion, their downfall, and their final suggestion of some 
higher form that in a new life is to spring out of them. 
Side by side with this deliberate personification of an 
idea there runs through the text an elaborate dialectical 
analysis; this quasi-biography of an incarnation of the 
world-spirit is associated with a logical criticism of a typ- 
ical opinion, or of the rationality of a certain resolution 
or motive or mental attitude — all this is characteristic 
of the baffling, but deliberate, method of the work. The 
presentation is very generally saved from mere pedan- 
try, such as an elaborate logical analysis of what is all 
the time viewed as a live creature, might readily entail. 
It is saved by the novelty of the mode of treatment, by 
the remarkable union of a sensitive appreciation with a 
merciless critical analysis; in brief, by the author's 
genius and by his genuine philosophical interest. 

The usual character of the biography of any one of 
these Gestalten is as follows. Each expresses an attitude, 
an idea, and so a mode of behavior, a reaction towards 
the world, which at each stage appears inevitably to grow 
out of previous stages. Any such stage of consciousness 
presents itself, therefore, as inevitable, as rational, as 
the only way to live and to think, as the interpretation, 

151 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
of life, of thought, and of the universe. As a fact, so 
Hegel frequently assures us, each of these forms ex- 
presses in its own way, and according to its own lights, 
the genuine nature of the self. Within its own limits, 
each of these forms is the truth. It possesses in gen- 
eral "the certainty that it is all reality." As a fact, 
however, it implies some sort of contrast between a sub- 
jective and an objective aspect, present either within 
what it regards as itself, or in its relation to what it re- 
gards as its external world. In other words, each of 
these forms exemplifies some aspect of the problem of 
self -consciousness, some aspect of the problem as to the 
relation between thought and reality. And this prob- 
lem also appears in every such case as having more or 
less of practical, of passionate, or at least of significant 
and interesting value. The theoretical problems always 
appear as also life problems. The Gestalt in question, the 
Weltgeist thus incarnate, first becomes aware of its prob- 
lem by noting that it has not yet fully and consciously 
expressed, and found, what it means. Is it a contempla- 
tive observer of facts ? Then it has not yet seen just how 
these facts are related to its own nature. Is it rather a 
practical attitude towards the world, an attitude of am- 
bition, of protest, of rebellion, of reform ? Then it has not 
yet carried out its work. It must proceed to fight its bat- 
tle and to express itself. As the Gestalt thus undertakes 
the work of its little life, or on higher stages, of its world- 
wide expression, it at once must develop what is within 
and come in conflict with what is without. The result is, 
often enough, so far as this Gestalt is concerned, either 
comic or tragic in the resulting dialectic. The calm con- 
fidence of its beginning, or, so to speak, of its youth, 
turns as it proceeds into disappointment, into contra- 

152 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 
diction, into a more or less logical repentance. Its ideas 
prove to be fantastic, its supposed facts turn out to be 
dreams; its sincerity is exposed through the experience 
of life and through a merciless self-criticism, and then 
proves to be, sometimes self-deception, sometimes hypoc- 
risy, frequently both. The destiny of its life is deter- 
mined on the whole by a formula characteristic of He- 
gel's view of the dialectic method. Its external conflicts 
with the world that it views as its object or as other than 
itself, turn out to be also essentially internal conflicts. 
That is, for its own difficulties, it blames the world at 
first, but discovers that the fault is its own. On the other 
hand, its internal diremption, its inner contradiction, al- 
ways expresses itself in external conflicts. And just this 
unity of the external and internal is what furnishes the 
positive result of the process which upon each stage is 
carried out. What the Gestalt has falsely regarded as its 
own, proves to be due to what it had thought to be the 
utterly foreign world. On the other hand, whatever it 
finds in its world proves to be in turn the development, 
or the expression, of its own nature. Hence its failure 
implies a reconstruction of the view regarding itself and 
its world, with which it had begun. What it had called 
its own comes to seem foreign to it. What it had called 
utterly remote, and merely a not-self, turns out to be its 
own flesh and blood. In its own special form, then, this 
typical incarnation of the world-spirit passes away. But it 
gives place to an enriched view of the nature of things, 
which takes form in some new type of consciousness. 

As the reader follows this series of typical forms of 
consciousness, he is constantly impressed with the merci- 
lessly negative criticism which at every stage greets what- 
ever at the outset seems most individual of each Gestalt, 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
and most sacred from its point of view. That in develop- 
ing such an attitude Hegel is constantly inspired by a 
sense of the stern judgment that life and history in his 
day had passed upon human illusion and upon false ef- 
forts, is obvious enough. But the criticism in question is 
characteristic of the philosopher's own technical method. 
As dialectician, as exposer of contradictions, as negative 
adept in reflection, Hegel has learned from Socrates, 
from the Platonic dialogues, from the Kantian antin- 
omies, from Fichte, and from Schelling's joyous fond- 
ness for paradoxes. The negative procedure on its tech- 
nical side, is deliberate, minute, and often wearisome. It 
is represented at each stage by the philosopher not as his 
own external comment but as the internal development 
and experience of the Gestalt in question. But the reader 
learns to feel a sympathy for each successive incarnation 
of the Weltgeist, as conscious in the beginning of its own 
universal and divine mission, it sets out upon its career 
of world conquest, arrayed with all the spoils that have 
been accumulated by the labors of its predecessors, only 
to find itself ere long fast bound in the net of its own 
contradictions, and ending its days like a blinded Sam- 
son, a victim to the Philistines who are, after all, in this 
idealistic world, only its own thoughts. As a fact, Hegel 
regards and expressly proclaims the principle of what 
he here calls "negativity" as the principle both of the 
world process and of philosophical logic. Thus the dia- 
lectical method reaches in this work an explicitness not 
previously known in philosophical literature. But it must 
not be supposed that Hegel himself viewed this process as 
purely negative. In his introduction to the work, and 
repeatedly in the course of his discussion, he points out 
that each of these negative discoveries, however tragic 

154 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 
from the point of view of the life, that is, of the idea or 
opinion or attitude concerned, is in fact also a positive 
discovery, a new revelation as to the inter-relation of the 
mind and of things, a new proof that in the realm of ex- 
perience subject and object are not to be sundered, and 
that their unity develops out of the very conflicts which 
appear to exist between them so long as their relations 
are imperfectly appreciated. 

Rosenkranz in his biography of Hegel, narrates an 
oft-cited story of how in later years, when Hegel was at 
Heidelberg, a company of students to whom he was one 
evening in private conversation expounding some aspects 
and results of the dialectic method, listened with a 
certain terror to the apparently destructive attack upon 
various traditional views; so that when Hegel at length 
rose and left, one of the students exclaimed, as he 
watched the retreating figure, ' ' That is nobody but death 
himself, and so must everything pass away." (Das sei 
der Tod selber, und so milsse alles vergehen.) Another 
who was present had caught the positive undertone and 
outcome of the discussion, and expressed himself more 
cheerfully. As a fact, it was Hegel's characteristic view 
that all such negations mean, when viewed as it were 
from above, the inner self-differentiation of the life of 
the spirit, the enrichment of its existence through mani- 
fold finite expressions, which in their very variety and 
mutual opposition supplement one another, and together 
express the totality of a true life. The truth, says Hegel, 
in the introduction to the Phaenomenologie, ''is the 
whole." And because the truth is the whole, the utmost 
power of negation is powerless to prevent the world- 
spirit from coming to life in new forms, or from express- 
ing, through the higher wealth which these new forms 

155 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
contain, the positive results, which, for Hegel, are the 
inevitable outcome of the lower stages. 

IV. 

We are now prepared to sketch a little more con- 
nectedly the way in which the Phaenomenologie is built 
up. In the course of the preface which has become famous 
as the first formal statement of the programme of the 
coming Hegelian system of philosophy, Hegel announces 
that instead of beginning his proposed system with a 
direct account of the proof, he undertakes to prepare 
the way for philosophy by recounting the experience 
through which consciousness passes from naive to phil- 
osophical insight. The plan of denning a series of Ge- 
stalten is outlined. The relation of the logical examination 
of these stages to their character as forms present in the 
course of the life-history of humanity, is set forth. By the 
word "consciousness" Hegel means a mental process, in 
so far as it stands over against and opposed to some sort 
of fact or object. He defines in general the problem of 
consciousness as the problem of determining its own re- 
lation to its object. This relation cannot be determined 
without passing through a succession of views in which 
both the consciousness in question and the object of this 
consciousness are altered through reflection and through 
an experience of the problems of the situation. Con- 
sciousness, as he indicates in beginning the enterprise, 
will appear upon four distinct stages. First it appears as 
mere consciousness, that is, as the knowing process which 
finds a world of facts over against it, and which simply 
examines these facts to find what is certain or true about 
them. The second is the stage of self -consciousness, that 
is, of the essentially idealistic view, which regards its 

156 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 
object as in somewise the expression of itself. The third 
is the stage of reason, in which the objects of conscious- 
ness exist as the relatively impersonal embodiment of 
ideas, but in such wise that this highly categorized world, 
is regarded by the self as still identical in principle 
with its own constitution, so that the attitude of con- 
sciousness is expressible thus: There is indeed a world, 
and a real one, but this world is essentially mine, to com- 
prehend by my science, or to conquer by my will, in 
short, to possess, not as my private caprice, but as my 
universally valid truth. The fourth stage of conscious- 
ness is called Geist, that is, mind or spirit, in its fully 
concrete or explicit sense. The world of the spirit is the 
world which consists not only of my universally valid 
truth, but of my conscious truth, as is expressed by a 
social order to which I belong, by a humanity in whose 
life I take part. At the summit of the world of the spirit, 
as its absolute expression, appears a form or series of 
forms of consciousness, which in the table of contents of 
the Phaenomenologie is formally sundered from the 
Geist proper, that is, from the social type of conscious- 
ness. This is the consciousness of what one might call the 
super-social or religious realm, the last realm where con- 
sciousness pauses before it becomes explicitly and reflec- 
tively philosophical. 

In treating the first of these forms, namely Bewusstein, 
or simple consciousness, Hegel makes no attempt at in- 
troducing the quasi-biographical form which we have 
discussed in the foregoing. This, which is the introduc- 
tory discussion of the text, contains an elaborate dialec- 
tical proof of the general thesis of idealism. The ground 
covered is somewhat similar to that which one finds 
covered in Fichte and in Schelling, although the argu- 

157 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
ment is decidedly novel. The text is here, especially at a 
first reading, extremely difficult, and has unquestionably 
served to render the book esoteric, from the point of 
view of most readers. What is characteristic of the Phae- 
nomenologie begins with the second stage, with self-con- 
sciousness. Hegel's treatment is here founded upon the 
thought that, although a technical idealism is confined to 
the philosophers, every human being is practically, that 
is, in what we might now call the pragmatic sense, an 
idealist. For it is of the nature of a rational being to 
assert himself as the central reality of the world, and 
then to attempt to interpret all that he finds in terms of 
his own interests. So herewith the union of logical analy- 
sis with typical portrayal of human character and des- 
tiny begins. The first stage of self -consciousness is repre- 
sented by the naive individualism of the child or of the 
savage. The movement present upon this stage is deter- 
mined by the fact upon which Fichte and Schelling had 
insisted, by the fact that the self in order to be individ- 
ual, must needs be, however crudely, social, that is, must 
know itself by contrast with the other. Hence the first 
expression of self-consciousness in the form of crude in- 
dividualism, observes itself by virtue of contrast with the 
other self who appears as the intruder and disturber, 
that is, as false self in the world of the savage individual. 
u Iam the self ; but who are you ? ' ' Such is the attitude 
in terms of which the savage, or the boy, greets the 
stranger. Hence the natural condition of the crude self 
is indeed one of warfare with its kind. This primitive 
stage, essentially self-destructive, quickly gives place to 
stages of self -consciousness which involve still crude but 
intense forms of higher individualism. As the self grows, 
its world becomes more complex ; and at the stage of rea- 

158 



HEGEL'S PHAENOMENOLOGIE DES GEISTES 
son we pass to forms of consciousness which are still 
individual, but which appear with a highly rational or 
elaborately categorized world over against them, in which 
they seek their victory or their task, in terms which are 
not only individualistic, but also explicitly universal, so 
that each Gestalt seeks what it views as that which all the 
world is seeking. The world of Geist next appears as a 
series of incarnations of the self, which are no longer 
individual, but explicitly universal, and also social. In 
other words, these Gestalten are now entire societies, na- 
tions, stages of culture, or on higher levels, movements 
of thought and of general social action, — reforms, ^con- 
stitutions of society, institutions possessing spiritual 
significance. 

The chronological relations which these various forms 
are conceived to have, involves a complication only grad- 
ually explained in the text; the Gestalten of self -con- 
sciousness and of reason are contemporaneous with those 
of the Geist. That is, there are certain forms of individ- 
uality, which are found in, and are characteristic of, 
certain social types ; and which therefore in time appear 
along with the latter. But for the sake of the dialectical 
analysis, the forms of self-consciousness and of reason 
are analyzed before the forms of the Geist. A similar link 
connects certain forms of the religious consciousness with 
certain stages in the history of the Geist. Yet the forms 
of the religious consciousness are never treated in their 
entirety until after the forms of the social mind have 
been successively presented. 

So much for a first sketch of the plan of the Phaenom- 
enologie. Its outcome, viewed as a dialectical achieve- 
ment, is to be the definition of a form of consciousness 
which is to be identical with the philosophical conscious- 

159 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

ness itself. Philosophy appears, in Hegel's account, as 
the result of the lesson of the world's history. Yet this 
result does not depend merely upon transcending, but 
upon including all the forms of experience and of self- 
expression which have been learned by the way. The 
philosophical definition of the nature of the self, and of 
its relation to the world, will be possible only upon the 
basis of an appreciation of the forms under which the 
self expresses itself in the history of humanity. The les- 
son of history will be transformed by philosophy into 
the law of logic. Yet on the other hand, the logical de- 
velopment is dependent upon, and in its own abstract 
way will repeat, the development that the mind gets, 
through practical conflict with the world and with itself. 
The history of the human will, and of its purification 
through conflict and through tragedy, will be reflected 
in the realm of pure thought in the sequence of cate- 
gories, and in the definition of truth. 

Fichte, as you remember, had defined an ethical ideal- 
ism. Schelling had added an effort to unify idealism and 
natural history, and had found the culmination of his 
doctrine at the moment when he wrote the work which 
we at the last time reviewed, in a philosophy of art. 
Hegel begins by conceiving that the logic of history, or 
more generally, the logic of human activity and of the 
human will, is a natural preliminary to the compre- 
hension of theoretical truth. 



160 



LECTURE VII. 

TYPES OF INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL 

CONSCIOUSNESS IN HEGEL'S 

PHAENOMENOLOGIE. 

IN beginning the present discussion, it seems worth 
while to state a little more explicitly than was done 
at the last time how the argument of the Phaenom- 
enologie des Geistes is related to the general problem of 
idealism, i.e., the problem of denning the relation be- 
tween the external, or apparently external, world of ex- 
perience and the nature of the self. 

I. 

The interest of Hegel, as of all the idealists, is in de- 
fining, so far as possible, the true nature of this relation. 
Yet in the Phaenomenologie, which is an introduction to 
a philosophy and not a system of philosophy itself, such 
a deduction of the true relations of the self and the 
world cannot be completely stated. People often suppose 
that such a work as the Phaenomenologie is an effort to 
deduce a priori both the forms and the contents which the 
various stages of consciousness must necessarily assume. 
The reader who comes to the work in this spirit inev- 
itably asks, when Hegel mentions a given form of in- 
dividual, of social, or of religious consciousness, "Why 
must just this form of consciousness exist at all ? How do 
you know that such a form exists ? Do you know it other- 

161 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
wise than by your ordinary experience as a plain man? 
If so, do you not pretend to deduce what you actually 
find as a fact of human nature?" In answer to this objec- 
tion, it may be said that Hegel repeatedly and plainly 
admits that in the course of the Phaenomenologie he is 
not ''deducing" the existence of the various forms of 
consciousness mentioned in so far as they belong to our 
concrete experience of human life. He is merely using 
them as illustrations of the stages which are indeed 
demanded by the logic of the process of evolution of con- 
sciousness. At a given stage a problem appears. It is de- 
veloped. Its difficulties are made manifest. In so far the 
student of the problem becomes aware of a certain logical 
differentiation which the various phases or aspects of the 
problem have assumed in his own mind. Under these cir- 
cumstances he turns to life and finds there a form of 
practical, of common-sense, of personal, or of social 
activity which expresses in its own way substantially the 
same problem as the one with which he is dealing. In the 
Phaenomenologie Hegel hereupon uses the known char- 
acteristics and fortunes of this type of human life or of 
human consciousness as an illustration of the present 
phase of his problem. In this way one can understand a 
little better what at first sight seems very mysterious, 
namely the relation of Hegel's discussion to the chron- 
ological sequence of the stages he is analyzing. At certain 
points in his discussion it appears as if he regarded the 
chronological sequence of the stages of civilization as cor- 
respondent to the logical sequence of the stages of the 
problem that he is defining. And to some extent this is 
indeed the case. On the other hand, there are cases where 
the chronological sequence of the stages of consciousness 
in question is either, to our minds, entirely indeterminate 

162 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
or decidedly distinct from the logical sequence of the 
phases of the philosophical problem which Hegel is en- 
gaged in developing. Thus in the early part of that sec- 
tion of the Phaenomenologie, entitled Geist, where stages 
of civilization are especially in question, Hegel seems to 
be dealing first with relatively primitive, and then with 
relatively much more highly developed types of civiliza- 
tion. One is tempted, in view of the illustrations used, to 
suppose for a while that the chronology of European his- 
tory is in question. It seems in consequence purely 
fantastic when, in characterizing the mental life of what 
one might call the imperial type, Hegel makes a rapid 
and unexplained transition from his characterization of 
Roman civilization, to the characterization of the French 
monarchy of Louis XIV. The uninitiated reader asks at 
once, "What has become of the Middle Ages?" Again, in 
the earlier portions of the Phaenomenologie where Hegel 
is treating rather types of individuals than types of so- 
ciety, a series of phases of consciousness appears, con- 
taining, for instance, the consciousness of a savage at war 
with his fellow men ; the consciousness of the stoic inde- 
pendent of all fortunes ; the consciousness of the religious 
devotee, shut up in his cell and longing for a mystical 
union with a wholly indefinite and perfect deity; the 
consciousness of a Faust, as the early Faust fragment 
of Goethe defined that consciousness; the consciousness 
of a knight-errant, a sort of Don Quixote seeking in ad- 
venturous contest with the world his self-possession ; the 
consciousness of a group of pedantic scholars criticizing 
one another's productions — in brief, we find a series of 
forms of personality which seems to be the result of a de- 
cidedly arbitrary, although interesting, selection. One 
asks at once as to the chronological relations of these 

163 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
forms of personality. One feels that they do not belong to 
any one determinate temporal sequence. Yet the corre- 
spondence between the evolution of humanity and the 
logical evolution of a problem seems to be more or less a 
guiding principle with Hegel. The result, however, is 
baffling. 

All these varieties of expression are to be understood 
in the light of the consideration just mentioned. The 
Phaenomenologie is not responsible for the philosophy 
of history. It is responsible for the use of historical types 
as illustration of stages of the evolution of a rational con- 
sciousness. It finds the illustrations empirically. It ana- 
lyzes them logically. It is led by the analysis from stage 
to stage. 

But there are cases where the chronological relation 
itself becomes important; in such instances Hegel him- 
self is likely to inform us explicitly that this is so. 
There are connected historical processes whose connec- 
tion Hegel views as mainly a logical one. Such instances 
Hegel finds in the inevitable decay of small states, a 
decay which he believes to be due to the inner logical 
instability of their distinctly local or essentially provin- 
cial ideals. A world of small communities must give 
place, for reasons which Hegel regards as logical, to a 
world of an imperial type of social unity. And yet, Hegel 
himself views the process whereby this is accomplished 
as a process involving wars whose outcome he declares to 
be accidental — that is, these wars, whereby the imperial 
unity is indeed attained, are not determined in their 
details by the logical process in question. Another in- 
stance, very important for the general structure of the 
Phaenomenologie, is furnished by the dissolution of the 
imperial type of society through the attainment of 

164 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
individual independence on the part of the citizens, 
and a consequent rebellion against authority, whose di- 
rect result tends to be anarchy. Hegel, writing as he does 
in a period immediately subsequent to the French Revo- 
lution and at a time when the future constitution of 
Europe was entirely doubtful, speaks of this process not 
as one that constitutes the ultimate goal of human civili- 
zation but as one which to his mind is presumably des- 
tined to occur in a rhythmic way again and again in the 
course of human history. Thus provincialism leads to 
imperialism, imperialism to culture, and culture to a 
highly sophisticated individualism. Individualism, let 
loose, leads then to a temporary anarchy. And so, as 
Hegel in this book views the philosophy of social proc- 
esses, the social mind returns, through the condition of 
anarchy which is a sort of temporary relapse into sav- 
agery to the beginning of its life, and repeats, possibly in 
an almost circular way, the stages of its merely political 
self-expression. The logical lesson seems, so far, to be 
that, as Hegel conceived the matter in the early years 
of the nineteenth century, genuine stability, rational 
unity of consciousness, cannot be achieved upon a purely 
social basis. The logical outcome of the failure of man 
to give to the social order a permanent structure in the 
visible world is, in the Phaenomenologie, the transition to 
the religious, and through the religious, to the philosoph- 
ical consciousness. 

The evolution of religion itself Hegel defines in the 
closing section of the book as somewhat parallel to the 
social evolution. Only the chronological evolution of re- 
ligion is of another type. As a higher manifestation of 
the Geist, religion develops not in a circle, with a return 
to essentially the same anarchy as that with which it 

165 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
begins, but rather in a straight line, from a vague recog- 
nition of the divine in the powers of nature to the entire 
identification of the divine principle with the principle of 
a rational self-consciousness. The stages of the religious 
consciousness are at once logical and chronological, al- 
though it must here also be said that, in his sketch, Hegel 
considers only what he regards as the essential forms of 
religion, and does not attempt to predetermine such proc- 
esses as are exemplified by the long struggle amongst 
various religions, as for instance by the struggle between 
Mohammedanism and Christianity. Such matters he en- 
tirely ignores in his account of the development of the 
religious consciousness. They belong to those aspects of 
the historical life which a complete philosophy of his- 
tory might have to consider, but which the Phaenome- 
nologie, which is merely seeking illustrations, may wholly 
ignore. 

When we remember that the entire series of those 
forms of personal and social life which are depicted in 
the Phaenomenologie, is preceded, in the first part of 
the book, by an exposition of a series of views of the 
nature of things which is distinctly a series of philosoph- 
ical theories or conceptions, and is not a series 
of phases, either of the consciousness of persons or of 
the social consciousness, we see to how limited a degree 
the structure of the Phaenomenologie is dependent upon 
the thesis that psychology and the history of sociology 
can at once be interpreted in purely logical terms. 

II. 
Before we go further, it is worth while to dwell 
upon a brief sketch of the relation of the Phaenome- 
nologie to the purely philosophical outcome which Hegel 

166 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
is seeking. This outcome, as we know, is to be an abso- 
lute idealism. The thesis to be obtained is that all being, 
all life, all nature, all personal and all social conscious- 
ness, are expressions of the meaning of a single Absolute, 
whose experience is determined by one universal or neces- 
sary ideal. This Absolute is that which is directly ex- 
pressed in self -consciousness, in so far as self -conscious- 
ness is rational. In contrast with Schelling, Hegel lays 
much less stress upon the physical order of external 
things, and upon the unconscious aspect of mental life. 
He constantly recognizes the unconscious; but for him 
unconsciousness exists, so to speak, as an aspect of a given , 
and concrete conscious process, as when a man who is 
busy with practical life is unconscious of the motives that 
lie at the basis of his practical activities, or as when a 
man who is busy in a reasoning process is unconscious of 
the formal logic of that process. It is the destiny of He- 
gel's Absolute to be expressed in conscious form. Hegel 
insists that this conscious form must always be an indi-» 
vidual form. The Absolute must come to consciousness as 
an individual, or as a system of conscious individuals. 
With respect to the question as to whether the Absolute 
in its wholeness is a conscious being, the Phaenomenologie 
is distinctly ambiguous in its result. In the closing 
chapter of the book, where the results are outlined, 
it at once appears that the Absolute is a conscious- 
ness of the meaning of the entire human process, and 
that for the absolute consciousness, the various Ges- 
talten, the various phases of life, are in a genuine mean- 
ing present, and present at once. But since in this clos- 
ing chapter Hegel is especially describing the philosoph- 
ical type of consciousness itself, there is at least a strong 
indication that the consciousness which he here attributes 

167 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

to the Absolute is identical merely with the conscious- 
ness expressed in philosophy. The prevailing indication 
of the text would be that the Absolute comes to its com- 
pletest form of consciousness in rational individuals who, 
as seers or as thinkers, become aware of the rational na- 
ture of the entire process of rational life. I do not myself 
believe that this view of the matter remained for Hegel 
final. I believe that the sense of his later religious phi- 
losophy, as stated in his mature system, demands the 
reality of a conscious Absolute, whose consciousness, 
while inclusive of that of the rational human individuals 
and in fact of all finite beings, is not identical with the 
mere sum-total of these individual consciousnesses. But 
it is true that this result is not made manifest in the 
Phaenomenologie. It is also true that Hegel always ex- 
pressed himself so ambiguously upon the subject that a 
well-known difference of opinion as to his true meaning 
appeared amongst his followers. This difference led to 
the division and ultimately to the dissolution of the 
Hegelian school. 

Without attempting to consider whether the form in 
which the final or absolute consciousness gets embodied — 
that is, without attempting to decide whether it is God 
apart from the philosopher, who timelessly knows the 
meaning of the entire process of the finite world, or 
whether the divine consciousness appears only as the 
philosophical consciousness — we may, in any case, char- 
acterize the general nature of this absolute conscious- 
ness, or as Hegel calls it at the end of the Phaenome- 
nologie, the absolutes Wissen as follows: The Absolute 
whose expression is the world and, in particular, the 
world of human life, is a being characterized by a com- 
plete unity or harmony of what one might call a theoret- 

168 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
ical and practical consciousness. The theoretical con- 
sciousness is a consciousness which views facts and 
endeavors to apprehend them. The practical conscious- 
ness is a consciousness which constructs facts in accord- 
ance with its ideals. The absolute consciousness is both 
theoretical and practical. Furthermore, the abolute con- 
sciousness is a self-consciousness, in the sense which 
Schelling had already tried to define ; it contains nothing 
which is not its own object. It is nothing which is not 
known to itself. It is, therefore, a complete and organic 
union of a subjective and of an objective aspect. Mean- 
while, as we now know, the Hegelian thesis as to the 
structure of this Absolute Being involves the recognition 
that the dialectical method tells us an essential, or one 
might perhaps say the essential, truth with regard to the 
life of the Absolute. The true rational self-consciousness 
cannot express itself except in the form of a series of in- 
complete manifestations, which the complete conscious- 
ness interrelates, reconciles through a view of their inter- 
relations, but at the same time demands as its own 
necessary expression. In other words, an Absolute which 
is not expressed in finite form is impossible. 

On the other hand, a finite expression of consciousness 
which is not defective, self-conflicting, and in its finitude 
self-defeating, is impossible. The only way in which the 
perfect can express itself is through the imperfect. The 
Absolute cannot know itself except in terms of a finite 
world. Every stage and phase of this finite world must 
be defective, incomplete, self-contradictory, and when 
temporally viewed, transient, precisely in so far as it is 
finite. To be sure, throughout the entire process of finite 
defeat and decay, categories, types, structures, and what 
the ordinary consciousness calls substances, the natures 

169 



LECTUEES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
of things may and do persist. But the life of the world 
is not in this, its permanent structure. For this perma- 
nent structure is only the abstract aspect of things. The 
life of the world has to be expressed in a series of forms, 
each of which is transient, while the relation between 
them is the dialectical relation. That is, each lower form, 
contradicting itself, and in so far passing away, finds 
what Hegel calls its truth upon a higher stage. Yet the 
lower form in turn can insist that without it the higher 
stage would be logically impossible. Indeed the lower 
form in some sense persists, preserves its meaning, as an 
organic part of the higher form. The immortal soul of 
whatever has decayed is temporarily preserved in what- 
ever succeeds it. Nothing passes away without leaving 
its mark. Thus the lower forms are preserved in the 
higher, and at the same time keep their place in the uni- 
verse as a whole in a two-fold way. 

This is the two-fold way. The true view of life, of con- 
sciousness, of history, of the universe, is essentially a 
non-temporal point of view, which sees at once all these 
phases as, each in its place, necessary. But in so far as 
the phases are viewed as sequent one to another in time, 
the later phases include the immortal meaning of the 
earlier phases. In expressing this last doctrine Hegel lays 
considerable stress upon a thesis which has become well- 
known in connection with the later doctrine of evolution. 
Every individual recapitulates in his development the 
phases of individual life which have temporally pre- 
ceded him ; so that every individual in his evolution is a 
mirror of the entire process of temporal evolution, up to 
the stage which he himself occupies. Hegel's theory of 
the Absolute is therefore at once, and in a way which 
is not very clearly explained, an evolutionary theory 

170 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
and a non-temporal theory. The absolute consciousness is 
an inclusion in a single non-temporal consciousness of the 
meaning of all temporal processes. But, on the other 
hand, the absolute consciousness is the goal of an his- 
torical process. Viewed in its latter aspect the evolution- 
ary relation of the absolute consciousness seems pecul- 
iarly puzzling, for one inevitably asks Hegel, what is it 
that is to happen next, now that by hypothesis in some 
form the absolute consciousness has been attained by the 
discovery of the meaning of the whole history ? But such 
questions go beyond what it is now necessary to consider 
in our attempt to grasp the general significance of this 
idealistic doctrine. 

III. 

If we turn to the study of the special phases through 
which consciousness passes, as these are depicted in the 
Phaenomenologie, we find that the defects of the imper- 
fect phases are such as, according to the doctrine, tend of 
themselves to make clear the structure of the absolute 
consciousness. For as you have just heard, the imperfec- 
tions of the finite are all of them aspects of the complete 
expression of the infinite or perfect self or Absolute. 
Let us enumerate, then, some of these defects as they 
come out in the course of the book. The lower stages of 
consciousness, whether individual or social, may first be 
viewed as divided into two types. They are stages where 
the finite subject, or knower of the process in question, 
is either too exclusively theoretical or too exclusively 
practical in his attitude towards his life and towards his 
world. The Absolute alone combines in one both of these 
aspects. In finite life the too exclusively practical stages 
may be described as in general " blind.' ' Those who are 

171 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
confined to these stages are active, earnest, enthusiastic, 
fanatical, hopeful or heroic. But they do not rightfully 
grasp what it is they are trying to do. The too exclu- 
sively theoretical stages of consciousness may be de- 
scribed as relatively "empty." One looks on the world, 
but finds in it little of significance, of the ideal, of the 
valuable. One becomes skeptical. One mercilessly exposes 
the contradictions of his own abstract conceptions. One 
thinks ; but one has so far not learned to live. 

From another point of view the lower stages are dis- 
tinct from the absolute consciousness. The . finite self 
finds its world, whether this be theoretical or practical, 
as if it were something foreign. It fails to recognize its 
own unity with its world. Viewed theoretically, its facts 
then appear accidental or unexplained, or as if due to 
mysterious power. Viewed practically, the world seems to 
the mind uncanny or hostile. The finite self is not at 
home. It becomes a wanderer. It sees its destiny else- 
where. Perhaps it is in the desert, guided only by the 
pillar of cloud by day and by fire by night. Perhaps it is 
amongst its foes who must be defeated. Perhaps, like 
Kant, it is dealing with the mysterious thing in itself. 
However the foreign world appears, the defect is that the 
self here does not recognize this world as its own. Or 
again, although on higher stages it may be thoroughly 
sure, as heroic and confident reformers are sure, that its 
world is its own and truly belongs to it, or as Hegel ex- 
presses it, as an sich, the self, the subject, does not yet see 
how this is true. Obviously the defective stages may here 
be, as we have said, either theoretical or practical. They 
may also be either individual or social. Israel in the wil- 
derness, which Hegel himself does not mention as an il- 
lustration, would stand for a society whose world is for- 

172 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
eign and whose laws are, consequently, supposed to be 
merely an ideal legislation for a future commonwealth. 

But the imperfect life of the finite self may be char- 
acterized in still another way. In general the firite stages 
of consciousness are those in which the subject assumes 
some special form — is, as Hegel often says, bestimrnt, that 
is determined to a particular way of living or of think- 
ing. Dialectical considerations, then, always insure that 
over against this special form of self -consciousness, and 
in so far contemporaneous with it, there must be other 
opposed forms of subjectivity. These opposed forms of 
subjectivity are, then, to any one of the determinate sub- 
jects, his enemies. And so the world assumes the type 
which we characterized a moment ago. From this point 
of view finite life appears not merely as a passing away 
of each stage but as a conflict upon each stage with its 
own enemies, who are after all identical in nature with 
itself. 

The imperfect stages of finite consciousness may be 
also viewed thus : The self, anticipating its own absolute 
calling and destiny, confident that it does know the 
world, may try to express the still unclear consciousness 
of its absoluteness either by affirming itself as this ego, 
this person, or on the other hand, by sacrificing all its 
personality and surrendering itself to a vague Absolute. 
In other words, the self may be thus a conscious individ- 
ualist, or a self-abnegating mystic. In its social forms, 
this opposition between two imperfect types of self-con- 
sciousness would be expressed, for instance, in anarchy 
on the one hand and despotism on the other. That is, the 
theory of society might be founded on the maxim, Every- 
one for himself; or it might be founded on the maxim, 
All are subject to one. Whether individual or social, this 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
type of finite imperfection is found exemplified all the 
way through the series of stages. 

If one contrast with these types of imperfection the 
type of an absolute consciousness, of the consciousness 
that views itself, and rightly views itself, as world-pos- 
sessor and as self-possessor, this fulfilled self of the ab- 
solute knowledge must, according to Hegel, possess the 
following characteristics : 

(1) It must be an union of theoretical and practical 
consciousness. It must see only what is its own deed, and 
must do nothing except what it understands. Precisely 
this, according to Hegel, is what occurs, to be sure in a 
highly abstract form, in the philosophical theory of the 
categories such as he afterwards embodied in his logic. 
For the categories of the Hegelian logic are at once pure 
thoughts and pure deeds. 

(2) The absolute consciousness must be that of a 
self which is conscious of objects without going beyond 
its consciousness to find them. Such a consciousness, 
Hegel views as in the abstract realizable in a philosoph- 
ical system. 

(3) Somewhat more important still is the considera- 
tion that the Absolute must be a self that by virtue of its 
inmost principle appears to itself as an interrelated unity 
of selves without being the less one self. From this point 
of view Hegel calls the Absolute, Geist. Spirit in its com- 
plete sense is a consciousness, for which the individual 
exists only in social manifestation and expression, so 
that an individual apart from other individuals is mean- 
ingless, and so that the relations of individuals have been 
so completely expressed that each finds his being in all 
the others and exists in perfect unity with them. In his 
later system of philosophy this view of the nature of 

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INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
spirit lies at the foundation of Hegel's interpretation 
of the positive theory both of society and of religion. 
In the Phaenomenologie, the highest form of spirit 
which appears concretely expressed in the life of human- 
ity is the form assumed by the church, in so far as the 
church is in possession of a perfectly rational religion. 
The Holy Spirit, identical with and present in the true 
life of the church, is for Hegel, in the Phaenomenologie, 
the living witness to this essentially social character of 
the absolute consciousness. That there appears considera- 
ble doubt whether the church as Hegel conceives it in this 
book is precisely identical with any one of the forms 
which the Christian church has assumed, is a considera- 
tion which does not here further concern us. 

(4) Possibly the most notable feature of the abso- 
lute consciousness is that which unites completely finite 
and infinite. It saves its absoluteness by assuming special 
embodiments. Hegel always laid very great stress upon 
this thesis. It is a failure to grasp it which has so often 
made the religious conception of the deity what Hegel 
regards as abstract and relatively fruitless. To conceive 
God as first perfect by Himself and then, so to speak, 
capriciously creating a world of imperfection, this is not 
to conceive the divine consciousness as it is; it is per- 
fect through the infinite imperfections of its finite ex- 
pressions, and through the fact that these imperfections 
are nevertheless unifie.d in its complete life. In the Phae- 
nomenologie, this view is repeatedly insisted upon, and 
is expressed in connection with that phase of conscious- 
ness which Hegel calls the forgiveness of sin. 

The thesis, then, in terms of which Hegel defines his 
Absolute is that the absolute self is aware of itself as a 
process involving an inner differentiation into many 

175 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

centers of selfhood. Each one of these centers of selfhood 
is, when viewed as a particular center and taken in its 
finitude, theoretically self -contradictory, practically evil. 
On the other hand, each of these finite expressions 
of the self is theoretically true, in so far as it represents 
the Universal and is related thereto ; and it is practically 
justified, in so far as it aims at the Universal in deed and 
in spirit. In the religious consciousness of the forgive- 
ness of sin, the Absolute, both as forgiving infinite and 
as forgiven finite, reaches this consciousness in a form 
which expresses the absolute process. The absolute proc- 
ess is, however, further expressible, apart from such 
images and allegories. To Hegel's mind it is inseparably 
associated with religion in the form of a philosophical or 
scientific consciousness. This philosophical consciousness 
explains, justifies, makes clear the existence of finitude, 
actuality, imperfection, sin. In the form of the dia- 
lectical method, philosophy emphasizes that contradic- 
tory and imperfect expression is necessary to the life of 
the infinite. In assigning to each special category its 
place, exhibiting its defect, and justifying this defect by 
its place in the whole system, philosophy expresses in the 
form of a rational consciousness what the religious con- 
sciousness discovers in the form of the union of the finite 
and infinite through the forgiveness of sin. 

IV. 

I turn from this indication of a very remarkable at- 
tempt to solve the problems of that time and of this type 
of philosophy, to a mention of some of the special illus- 
trations. Let us confine ourselves for the moment to illus- 
tration of individual rather than of social types of con- 
sciousness. The first Gestalt of individual consciousness 

176 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
which Hegel considers is, as we said at the last time, the 
savage consciousness of the warrior, practically viewing 
himself as the only real self in the world, boasting his 
prowess as such, and consequently seeking to destroy 
whatever pretentious fellow may attempt falsely to be 
the self. It is because of the assurance, dim of course 
and purely practical, on the part of each man that he is 
the Absolute — it is because of this that the universal 
war of all against all appears. This primitive state of uni- 
versal war, a conception which Hegel in so far accepts 
from the seventeenth-century theories of human nature, 
is to his mind a phase of human nature as transient as it 
is irrational. The reason for this transiency lies in the 
fact that killing a man proves nothing, except that the 
victor, in order to prove himself to be the self, needs 
still another man to kill, and is therefore essentially a 
social being. Even head hunting implies dependence upon 
one's neighbor who is good enough to furnish one more 
head for the hunter. Let one note this element of mutual- 
ity, and mere destruction gives way to a higher form of 
social consciousness. This higher stage of individual self- 
realization is reached in the still primitive type of so- 
ciety which is represented by the master and his slave. 
The master essentially recognizes that he needs somebody 
else in order that this other may prove him, the master, 
to be the self. The best proof that I am the self, so the 
master thinks, is given when another is subject to my 
will. Because he is another, and in so far a self, he by con- 
trast assures me of my own selfhood ; for with Hegel as 
with Schelling individual self-consciousness is a social 
contrast effect. For after all, I can only know myself as 
this individual if I find somebody else in the world, by 
contrast with whom I recognize who I am. But the mas- 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
ter essentially hopes to prove himself to be the true 
self, by making the slave his 'mere organ, the mirror 
of his own functions, his will objectified. The world of 
the master and slave is therefore explicitly two-fold, 
and is not like the world of the head-hunting warriors, 
the world in which each man lived only by denying that 
the other had any right to live. The slave, to be sure, has 
no rights, but he has his uses, and he teaches me, the 
master, that I am the self. Unfortunately, however, for 
the master, the master hereby becomes dependent upon 
the slave's work. The master after all is merely the on- 
looker and is self only so far as he sees the other at work 
for him. The master's life is therefore essentially lazy 
and empty. Of the two, the faithful slave after all comes 
much nearer to genuine selfhood. For self-consciousness 
is practical, is active, and depends upon getting control 
of experience. The slave, so Hegel says, works over, re- 
constructs the things of experience. Therefore by his 
work he, after all, is conquering the world of experi- 
ence, is making it the world of the self, is becoming the 
self. The slave is potentially, or in embryo — is an sich, as 
Hegel would say — the self-respecting man, who in the 
end must become justly proud of the true mastery that 
his work gives him. Let this essential character of the 
slave, — the fact that he, as worker, is the only true man 
in this primitive society — let this fact come to his own 
consciousness, and the self becomes transformed from 
slavery to a higher phase of consciousness. This new 
phase is represented in Hegel's account, curiously 
enough, by a form which in history appears as a stage 
of philosophical consciousness, namely, by stoicism. 

Stoicism, however, is here viewed in its practical, and 
not in its theoretical, aspects as a doctrine of the world. 

178 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
Practically stoicism is the attitude of the man who re- 
gards all things with which he deals as necessarily sub- 
ject to his own reason, whether he can control them phys- 
ically or not ; because he has found that the self, through 
its own rational ideal, needs no slaves, no conquest at 
war, to prove its independence. He is still a member of 
a society, but it is now an ideal society, composed of 
the stoic and of his ideal Reason, his guide. Through 
the discipline of life the stoic has become entirely indif- 
ferent to whether he is master or slave. Whether on the 
throne or in chains or in service, the self, and just the 
individual self, is self-possessed if it ideally declares 
itself so to be. Its social relation, its relation to another, 
is now simply its relation to its own ideal. I and my rea- 
son constitute the world. The dialectical defect of the 
stoic's position is that the actual world of the stoic's 
life — the world of activity, of desire, of interest — is 
meanwhile going on in its own accidental way. The self in 
order to attain independence has resigned all definite 
plans of control over fortunes. Its concrete life is there- 
fore empty. If it hereupon becomes aware of this fact it 
turns from the stoic into the skeptic, and learns to doubt 
even its own present ideal. Hegel here has in mind the 
practical aspect of the forms of older ancient skepticism, 
which undertook to retain the term of rational self -con- 
sciousness by a reflection upon the vanity of all special 
doctrines, ideals, dogmas, assurances, concerning com- 
mon life. The skeptic, a Diogenes in a tub, proves his 
independence by destroying convictions, by being en- 
tirely indifferent to conventions, by being essentially 
restless, and merely dialectical. The result of a thorough- 
going adoption of this point of view is that life gets the 
sort of vanity which has been well suggested to our own 

179 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
generation by Fitzgerald's wonderful paraphrase of the 
Omar Khayyam stanzas. The self is now indeed free, but 
life is vain; and the world has once more fallen, seem- 
ingly in a hopeless way, into chaos. The Weltgeist, rec- 
ognizing its failure so far to win its own, must once more 
transmigrate. 

V. 
Hereupon Hegel introduces as the next Gestalt of indi- 
vidual consciousness a very remarkable one entitled, 
''The Unhappy Consciousness. ' ' That the consciousness 
of the Omar Khayyam stanzas is unhappy we shall all 
remember. And that this unhappiness results from skep- 
ticism concerning the worth of every concrete human life, 
is also obvious. What Hegel notes is the substantial iden- 
tity between a consciousness which is unhappy for this 
reason, and the consciousness which, like that expressed 
in well-known devotional books, such as The Imitation 
of Christ, or in the practical life of solitary religious 
devotees of all faiths, views its unhappiness as due to 
its estrangement from a perfection of life, which ought to 
be its own but which in this world of conflicting motives 
and transient activities seems hopelessly remote. Whether 
you express your unhappy consciousness in purely skep- 
tical or in devout form, that is, with emphasis upon a 
cynical or upon a mystical attitude, is to a certain degree 
a matter of accident. But of course the devotional expres- 
sion is the deeper one and looks more in the direction in 
which the solution of the problem, according to Hegel, 
is to be found. The unhappy consciousness is therefore 
depicted in its religious form, and with a constant use 
of metaphors derived from mediaeval Christianity. In 
fact Hegel is here unquestionably treating one aspect of 
the religious consciousness. It is however very notable, 

180 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
and characteristic of the method of the Phaenomenologie 
that Hegel does not regard this form of consciousness as 
a genuine expression of religion in its wholeness. Reli- 
gion as such appears in the Phaenomenologie as a social 
and not as an individual life. The unhappy conscious- 
ness is here expressly what William James would 
call a variety of religious experience ; it is not a concrete 
form of religion. It may appear in connection with the 
most various phases of faith. Viewed, so to speak, meta- 
physically, it involves a distinctly individual interpreta- 
tion of one 's relation to the universe. That which the un- 
happy consciousness seeks, can therefore indeed be 
named God. It might also be named just Peace, or the 
Ideal Self. 

If the unhappy consciousness occurs to a person at a 
given phase, he will of course use the terminology of his 
phase. But viewed as a personal experience, the unhappy 
consciousness is a search for tranquillity, tranquillity won 
by some union between the individual and his own ideal, 
between the lower and the higher self. The unhappy con- 
sciousness, then, is what James has described as the 
vague consciousness of being out of harmony with the 
higher powers, while these higher powers constitute, 
after all, very much what James characterizes as one's 
subliminal self. Hegel, who knows not the modern psy- 
chological vocabulary, calls this subliminal self with 
which the unhappy consciousness is out of harmony its 
own conceived and long-sought " changeless conscious- 
ness/' or as he briefly puts it, "the Changeless. ' ' In other 
words, in this particular incarnation, the Weltgeist of 
whom we spoke at the last time, is seeking himself 
through some lonely type of religious devotion. His world 
is nothing but himself ; and he is so far indeed idealistic. 

181 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
He is not thinking of nature or of fortune or of other peo- 
ple or of society. He is brooding. He is thinking only of 
his own soul and its salvation. The divine that he pursues 
is only the blessed relief from his sorrow which he seeks 
through his devotions. In brief, his religion is a phantasy 
of his inner consciousness, although his social relations 
to some real existing church may indeed give a deeper 
significance to the process than he alone can recognize. 
He himself is shut up in the cell with his sorrows and his 
ideals. But his difficulty is that he seems wholly self- 
estranged and foreign to himself. 

Hegel depicts this form of individual self-conscious- 
ness with a rather excessive detail but with a very pro- 
found insight into the sentimentality, the hopelessness, 
and the genuine meaning of the entire process. The dia- 
lectic situation depends upon the pathetic fact that the 
unhappy consciousness always actually has its salvation 
close at hand, but is still forbidden by its own presuppo- 
sitions to accept that salvation. What it seeks is nothing 
whatever but an inner self-confidence, which it appar- 
ently ought to win by a mere resolution — an act of manly 
will. Yet, by hypothesis, it is estranged from every reso- 
lute inner self -consciousness, since it conceives all good 
solely as belonging to its object, the Changeless. It prays 
to the Changeless, it longs for the Changeless. It tries to 
see its Lord face to face. But it always finds, says Hegel, 
only the empty sepulchre whence the Lord has been 
taken away. "Nay, if I find the Holy Grail itself, it too 
will fade and crumble into dust." 

Under these circumstances, however, the consciousness 
in question does indeed learn to make a transition, which 
is in so far positive and which is due to taking over the 
lesson that the slave learned from the master. After all, 

182 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
the very emptiness of the sepulchre shows that if the 
Lord is not here he is arisen. Seek not the living among 
the dead. One's seeking must become an activity; 
one must do something even as the risen Lord does. And 
so the mere sentiment of the first stage of this unhappy 
consciousness changes into service. But the service is not 
a control of natural phenomena ; it is not essentially any 
social business. It is the doing of what is pleasing in the 
sight of the Changeless; it is the life of self-sacrifice as 
such — the self-chastisement of the devotee. But once 
more the division recurs. What is done is, after all, but 
the transient deed of a poor sinner. The Changeless, the 
perfect, cannot be realized hereby. One's work is but 
vain. One's righteousness is as rags. The true self is 
not satisfied. One's best work gets all its value, (when it 
gets any value at all), from the fact that the foreign 
and changeless self somehow kindly inspires this deed 
of righteousness and permits the poor sinner to do some- 
thing for his Lord. But the doer himself still remains 
worthless, whatever he does. He wishes to be meet for 
the master's service, but after all he is but a broken and 
empty vessel, and this is all that he has to offer for the 
master's service. And under these circumstances the only 
hope must indeed come from the other side. After 
all, the changeless self is concerned in the salvation of 
this poor sinner, makes its own sacrifice for him, permits 
communion with the Changeless, gradually sanctifies the 
poor soul through the higher life, means in the end to 
bring the imperfect into union with itself. Quantus labor 
ne sit cassus, and so at length perhaps, through self-dis- 
cipline, self-abnegation, endless self -chastisement, the im- 
perfect self does come to some consciousness of a new 
and sanctified and redeemed nature. The Changeless 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
perchance has come to live in it. It has now become, 
through the ineffable grace of the Changeless, the instru- 
ment of the divine. 

But hereupon, for the unhappy consciousness the en- 
emy appears, as Hegel says, in his worst form. The 
former self-abnegation changes into spiritual pride. The_ 
sanctified person becomes the home of vanity, and needs 
a constantly renewed casting down into the depths of 
humility, until this very pride in its own expertness in 
the art of self-humiliation becomes the inspiring princi- 
ple of its life. It becomes intensely overcareful as to 
every detail of its fortunes and of its functions. Its ex- 
istence is one of painful conscientiousness, of fruitless 
dreariness. And yet, after all, if it could only reflect, it 
would see that through its despair it has already found 
the essential experience. For what it has essentially dis- 
covered is that if a man will reasonably submit himself 
to the conditions of the true life, he must attain, through 
activity, a genuine unity with his ideal world. In other 
words, the unhappy consciousness is simply seeking in its 
lonesomeness what the civilized man is finding in his con- 
crete relations, not to the enemies whom he kills, nor to 
the slaves whom he controls, nor to the abstract ideals 
that he follows, but to the humane life in which he finds 
his place. Whenever consciousness reaches, says Hegel, a 
stage of genuine reason, it becomes sure of itself and rests 
from the vain labors of all this suspicious self-question- 
ing. It finds indeed a new field of work, and of intense 
and absorbing work, but not the labor of conquering these 
fantastic spiritual foes. It becomes assured that the prac- 
tically humane life is, in meaning, one with the whole of 
reality. The unhappy consciousness, however, can in and 
for itself never recognize this fact. It will not wake up to 

184 



INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 
its own truth. To quote Hegel's words : "Rather does this 
consciousness only hear as if spoken by some meditating 
voice, the sole, fragile assurance that its own grief is in 
the yet hidden truth of the matter the very reverse, 
namely, its salvation; the bliss of an activity which re- 
joices in its tasks. This voice of the spirit tells the un- 
happy consciousness in its own way that the miserable 
deeds of the poor sinner are in some hidden truth the 
perfect work, and the real meaning of this assurance is 
that only what is done by an individual is or can be a 
deed. But for the unhappy consciousness both activity 
and its own actual deeds remain miserable. Its satisfac- 
tion is its sorrow and the freedom from this sorrow in a 
positive joy it looks for in another world, in heaven. But 
this other world, where its activity and being are to be- 
come and to remain its own real activity and being — 
what is this world but the world of the civilized reason, 
where consciousness has the assurance that in its individ- 
uality it is and possesses all reality?"* But this, insists 
Hegel, is just the normal consciousness of the civilized 
man. It is what one might call the form of a realistic con- 
sciousness which is also saturated by idealism. And here- 
with the Weltgeist transmigrates again into the new indi- 
vidual form of the man who says, ' ' The world is mine to 
live in and therein to find my fulfilment and my task." 
This new world of youthful and vigorous consciousness, 
this world of the renaissance of individuality, Hegel calls 
the World of Reason, but of reason still in its individual 
rather than in its social expression. Thus, Vernunft at 
this stage of the Phaenomenologie appears as equivalent 

* See the author 's translation of this section of the Phenome- 
nology under the title ' ' The Contrite Consciousness, ' ' in Benjamin 
Rand's Modern Classical Philosophers, pp. 614-628. — Ed. 

185 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
to the civilized consciousness of the man of the world or, 
at any rate, of the man who has a world of his own. The 
devotee as an individual may always remain in his 
cloister, but the Weltgeist transmigrating awakens in 
new individual form, as the Faust transformed by magic 
into the youthful seeker of good fortune, as the vigorous 
sentimentalist who no longer broods but passionately 
demands satisfaction of life, as the reformer who-vrill 
transform all things into the likeness of his own ideal; 
in brief, as a man who has found his task and to whom 
the world is in the larger sense his business. 



186 



LECTURE VIII. 

THE DIALECTICAL PROGRESS OF HEGEL'S 
PHAENOMENOLOGIE. 

A T the last lecture, in following Hegel's Phae- 
/\ nomenologie des Geistes, we reached the thresh- 
JL A. old of what he called the World of Reason, that 
is, the world of organized self-consciousness, as distinct 
from elemental or crude self-consciousness. The series of 
types of human life and character in terms of which 
Hegel has been trying in the previous parts of his book 
to illustrate the logical evolution of the higher conscious- 
ness of humanity, has been followed, in our account, 
through what one might call the stages of wholly imma- 
ture individualism. We now come to the portrayal of a 
higher series of types. I need not repeat what I have said 
regarding the way in which these successive stages of con- 
sciousness form for Hegel at once a logically connected 
series of views concerning life and reality and, when 
viewed from another side, a freely chosen set of mere 
illustrations of his systematic views. The curious union 
of technical logic with free character study has been suffi- 
ciently characterized in the foregoing. We are now taking 
the book simply as we find it, as a collection of portraits 
illustrating Hegel's idealism and the steps by which we 
may approach it. In this spirit I continue my exposition. 
We are to see in what forms the self has to express itself 
in order to reach completeness and self-possession. 

187 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
I. 

Hegel's Weltgeist, in the successive forms or finite 
lives through which, in our former lecture, we found 
him, as we might say, transmigrating, had learned 
the lesson that if the world is indeed the self, the self, 
on the other hand, can never learn to realize this-very 
truth so long as it remains merely an individual self, 
cut off from organic ties with a world of social life. The 
self needs, demands — yes, must somehow create — a 
social world. The ideal hero of Hegel 's Phaenomenologie, 
name him Weltgeist, or call him by a more familiar 
word, Everyman, has now learned this lesson through 
the experience which our former lecture reported. As sav- 
age or, if you please, as a sort of head-hunter, the Welt- 
geist has slain his fellows in order to prove, through risk 
and through conquest, that he is indeed the self. As 
master of slaves, this same Everyman has helplessly de- 
pended upon his own slaves to prove him the only lord 
of all. But the Weltgeist thus becomes the slave as well 
as the master. And as slave, the same Weltgeist has 
learned that only in service is there freedom. As stoic 
the well-trained hero, now utterly indifferent to mere 
fortune, has learned to serve only his own empty ideal, 
and so has indeed triumphed — but only in the void 
realm of mere abstract reasonableness, where after all, 
there is nothing definable left to do or to be. As skeptic, 
however, the same hero has observed the vanity of all 
such mere opinion; and hereupon has been transformed 
into the Unhappy Consciousness. In the dreary and soli- 
tary religion of this type, the experience of the merely 
unsocial self culminates. For as lonely religious devotee, 
estranged from himself, our hero has sorrowed through 

188 



DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
a comfortless lifetime in fantastic dreams of an impos- 
sible heaven of mere reconciliation and peace. 

From these dreams the Weltgeist now awakens to a 
renewed youth as the lover of what men call real life. 
"The world is mine," he says; "but in that case let it 
be indeed a world. I will set out on the quest for my own 
happiness, sure that I have a right thereto. ' ' 

" 'Tis life of which our nerves are scant — 
1 * More life and fuller that we want. ' ' 

The complex structure of Hegel's Phaenomenologie is 
at this point of the text entangled by the intro- 
duction of a long critical study of the problems of what 
Hegel calls "Reason as Observer of the World" (Beo- 
bachtende Vernunft). I shall wholly pass over this por- 
tion of the text, whose outcome is the thesis that the self, 
upon this stage, can win unity with its world not through 
mere observation but through action. Hereupon the self 
fully returns to the pragmatic point of view, realizing 
that it can win its self-control and its unity with its 
world, only through an active process. 

This discovery once made, our hero arises with some- 
thing of the enthusiasm that Tennyson's familiar words 
may here translate: 

"Eager hearted as a boy when first he leaves his 
father's field." 

And so our hero sets out to become a worldling. 

II. 

The types of consciousness which here immediately fol- 
low, are depicted with a marvelous union of sympathetic 
detail and of merciless dialectic peculiarly characteris- 

189 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
tic of Hegel. They are, one might say, renaissance types 
of character — ethical and not theoretical^-interpreted, 
however, from the point of view which German roman- 
ticism had determined. Common to them all is the ex- 
plicit recognition that without actively pursuing its ideal 
in a world of life, in a world of objective fortune, in an 
organized and social order, the self cannot win its own 
place, cannot be a self at all. Common to them all is the 
further fact that the self, despite this recognition, tries 
to center this acknowledged social world about just that 
individual man in whom the self, by chance, conceives 
itself, in each new incarnation, to be embodied. The 
conception of the social universe is thus, each time, char- 
acteristically that of vigorous and ambitious youth, con- 
fident that in him the absolute ideal has found an incar- 
nation, nowhere else attained. "I will show you, 
world, that you are my own,'* he says. Yet he speaks not 
as the savage. He is the civilized youth, with powers, 
talents, training, and a love of emulation. He must con- 
quer his world; but he knows that he needs a world to 
conquer, and is so far dependent. Not the killing of his 
enemies, but spiritual mastery of the universe is his aim. 
Moreover, he has behind him, in essence although per- 
haps not in memory, the experience of the unhappy con- 
sciousness. A merely sentimental and lonely religion 
seems to him vanity. He is beyond all that. For 
the time, he has no religion whatever. He is not afraid of 
life. He sets out to win and to enjoy. He recognizes that 
the truth of things is the human, the social truth. But he 
is resolved that whatever any man can experience, pos- 
sess, attain, is by right his, so far as his ideal demands 
such possession. 

He begins this sort of life by taking form as Faust. 
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DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
The Faust-ideal in question is due to so much of that 
poem as was at this time known to Hegel, and is not the 
Faust-ideal that Goethe later taught us to recognize as 
his own. Hegel conceives the Faust of the poem, as it 
was then before him, simply as the pleasure seeker long- 
ing for the time when he can say, "0 moment stay, 
thou art so fair." The outcome of Faust's quest, as far 
as it goes, is for Hegel the discovery that the passing mo- 
ment will neither stay nor be fair; so that the world 
where one seeks merely the satisfaction of the moment, 
proves rather to be the foreign world of a blind necessity. 
This necessity, in the guise of cruel fate, ruthlessly de- 
stroys everything that has seemed, before the moment of 
enjoyment, so entrancing. Pleasure seeking means, then, 
the death of whatever is desirable about life ; and Hegel 
foresees, for Faust himself, so far as just his incarnation 
of the Geist can go, no escape from the fatal circle. At all 
events, the self is not to be found in this life of lawless 
pursuit of that momentary control over life which is 
conceived as pleasure. Such is Hegel's reading of the 
first part of Faust. He entitles the sketch, ' ' Pleasure and 
Destiny." 

The next form or incarnation of our hero is entitled, 
* ' The Law of the Heart. ' ' In making the transition from 
the pleasure-seeking consciousness with its inevitable dis- 
covery of a world of blind necessity, where every pleas- 
ure fades, Hegel shows a very fine comprehension of 
tendencies which the romantic movement had already 
notably exemplified, and which it was, in later literature, 
still further to exemplify. For the lesson of the defeated 
and romantic pleasure seeker's experience is indeed not, 
in strong and free natures, mere repentance, nor yet a 
mere reversion to the "unhappy consciousness." Hegel 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

does not send his disillusioned worldling back to the 
cloister. The lesson rather is the discovery that the hero 
had been really seeking, not pleasure as such at all, but 
something so potent, so full of appeal to his heart that he 
would be as ready to die as to live for such an ideal ; some- 
thing in brief that could fill him with enthusiasm and de- 
votion. The emptiness of the pleasure seeker's outcome 
lies simply in the fact that, after all, he has so far failed 
to find the "God stronger than I am, who coming shall 
rule over me" — that God of whom Dante tells us in the 
Vita Nuova. Let him merely define, at the moment of his 
disillusionment, this his deeper need, and then he be- 
comes conscious of what his blundering quest had all the 
time meant. His repentance will then be no mere terror 
of perdition. Years after the appearance of the Phae- 
nomenologie, Byron, who had tested the fate of the pleas- 
ure seeker to its end, wrote the Stanzas to Augusta, and 
his lyric after landing in Greece. Both are perfect recog- 
nitions of what Hegel here calls ' ' the law of the heart, ' ' 
as the true lesson of the pleasure seeker's failure. Both 
express the discovery that, after pleasure has been 
drained to the dregs and life has so far turned into an 
iron necessity of failure, one still may rejoice to find out 
that one had all the while simply been looking for a way 
to fill one's heart full of a sovereign love for something 
worthy of one's faith : 

" And if dearly that error hath cost me, 
And more than I once could foresee, 
I have found that, whatever it lost me, 
It could not deprive me of thee. 
From the wreck of that past, which hath perish 'd, 
Thus much I at least may recall, 
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DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
It hath taught me that what I most cherish 'd 
Deserved to be dearest of all: 
In the desert a fountain is springing, 
In the wild waste there still is a tree, 
And a bird in the solitude singing, 
Which speaks to my spirit of thee." 

III. 

This transformation of the love of pleasure into the 
longing for a passionate ideal, is something much deeper 
than mere remorse. The outcome of the search for the 
satisfying moment of experience is the discovery of the 
law that all passes away and turns into the sere and yel- 
low leaf. The lesson is that if one adopts this very law 
as one's own, if one scorns delight and lives laborious 
days, simply because all else fades, while the inmost de- 
sire of the heart may outlast all transient contentment, 
then one is nearer to one's own true expression. Choose 
your ideal then, choose it anyhow, and be ready to die 
for it. Then for the first time you learn how to live. Liv- 
ing means having something dear enough to fill the heart. 

Thus Hegel suggests his diagnosis of the remarkable 
transition from passionate pleasure seeking to vehement 
self-surrender which is so notable in romantic periods 
and in youthful idealism. 

The next type, the hero of the "law of the heart," here- 
upon appears as an enthusiast for an ideal — what ideal 
is indeed indifferent except so far as his own mere feel- 
ing is his guide. His heart tells him that this is his ideal. 
He is ready to die for it. That is enough. He has found 
himself. All about him, of course, is the vain world of 
the people who do not comprehend this ideal. But the 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
hero is an altruist. His heart beats high for the good of 
mankind. What mankind needs is to learn of his ideal. 
He is therefore a reformer, a prophet of humanity, 
one of whom, as his own heart infallibly tells him, the 
world is not worthy. He is good enough, nevertheless, to 
be ready to save this so far ruined world. Meanwhile, 
the ideal for which he fights is always essentially senti- 
mental. If as reformer he wins his triumph, he instantly 
discovers that whatever has won the day has by the very 
triumph been turned into mere worldliness ; and he is 
even more disposed to quarrel with his party, so soon as 
it has triumphed, than he had been to condemn the base 
world as it was before he came into it. Nothing, therefore, 
is less to his mind than a cause which has triumphed; 
such a cause is no longer a mere affair of the heart. The 
romantic reformer lives by having a base world to con- 
demn. He would indeed reform it ; but woe unto the social 
order that chances to accept his reform. His heart is too 
pure to be content with such humdrum worldly actuality. 
He rages because the base world has profaned the ideal 
even through the very act of pretending to accept it. 

Since in a similar fashion all other hearts, if once 
awakened, are laws unto themselves, the realm of such a 
company of romantic reformers is a renewal, upon a 
higher level, of the primal warfare of all against all. It 
is a world of mad prophets, each the fool of his own van- 
ity. In depicting this type, Hegel has in mind the speech 
of the hero of Schiller's Robbers, and the enthusiasts of 
storm and stress literature generally, in so far as they 
are humanitarian in their pretences and anarchical in 
their conflict with the prevailing social order. The por- 
trayal of the type is merciless in its dialectic, but is not 
without its obvious justice. 

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DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
IV. 

To the tragi-comedy of the purely sentimental reform- 
ers, succeeds the more familiar comedy of the romantic 
knight-errants — the heroes whose ideal has dropped 
the passionate insistence upon a sentimental dream, 
and has assumed the form of a coherent law, but 
who still center this law of the world about their own 
noble personalities. Here, as is obvious, Hegel is dealing 
with that type whose dialectic Cervantes had long since 
rendered classic. It is necessary for Hegel, however, to 
incorporate a representative of this type into his own 
series; and he does sp very briefly, but effectively. The 
hero of knightly virtues here depicted is no longer 
a mediaeval figure, and the portrait is not directly that 
of Don Quixote. The illusions in question take only such 
forms as belong to Hegel's own age. In essence, the at- 
titude depicted is that of the ideally minded youthful 
altruist whose knightly quest is directed against the law- 
less selfishness which, in his opinion, infests the social 
order, while the knightly character itself takes pride, not 
indeed like the foregoing type, in mere chance enthusi- 
asms, but in its steadily loyal attitude of self-sacrifice 
for its chivalrous purpose. It defines its ideal as virtue 
in the abstract, as nobility of character. All of its natural 
powers are to be disciplined, not for the sake of enforc- 
ing the law of the heart, but for the sake of overcoming 
the wicked ways of the world where selfishness reigns. 
The natural man is now denounced as a brutish self- 
seeker. The world as it is contains giants of wrongdoing, 
and is given over to selfishness. The knightly soul is op- 
posed to the natural man and fights for the cause of an 
ideal chivalry whose essence consists in loving and serv- 

195 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
ing virtue and surrendering one's self with no more or- 
ganized purpose than that of such self-surrender. 

The admirable personal intents of such an idealist do 
not blind us to the fact that, as Hegel points out, his 
powers and his culture are due to the very society that 
his lofty conceit affects to despise. And since in his plans 
he now lacks any definite relation to the objective de- 
mands of this real social order, since it is not good citi- 
zenship which guides his activities, but simply his own 
impression regarding the nobility of his character and 
aims, his ideal has to remain not merely unpractical, but 
empty. He lives in phrases and illusions. As against his 
boasts, it is the selfish world after all that, in its own 
crude way, accomplishes whatever social good is accom- 
plished at all. 

V. 

The result of the dialectic of these successive types is 
so far obvious. The individual in order to come to him- 
self needs a world, and a social one, to win over and to 
control. But control can only be won through self -sur- 
render. Hence the individual needs a world where he 
may find something to which he can devote himself as 
to an objective truth — something quite definite which he 
can serve unhesitatingly so as to be free from the queru- 
lousness of the restless reformer, and free too from 
the idle vanity of the knight-errant. The true world 
must become for me the realm of my life task, of my 
work, of my objectively definite and absorbing pursuit. 
Only so can I truly come to myself and to my own. Is 
not then, after all, the artist who pursues art for art's 
sake, the scholar, who loves learning just for learning's 
sake, the man, in brief, who is completely given over to a 
laborious calling just for the sake of the absorbing con- 

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DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
sciousness which accompanies this calling — is not such a 
man, at length, in possession of the true form of self-con- 
sciousness? My work, my calling, my life task — this I 
pursue not because I wish for mere pleasure, but because 
I love the work. Moreover, this task is indeed the law of 
my heart ; but I do not seek to impose it upon all other 
men. I leave them free to choose their life tasks. Nor is 
my calling merely an object of sentiment. I view it as a 
worthy mode of self-expression. Meanwhile, unlike the 
knight-errant, I do not pretend to be the one virtuous 
representative of my calling, who as such is reforming 
the base world. No, in my calling, I have my colleagues 
who work with me in a common cause. This cause (die 
Sache) is ours. Here, then, are the conditions of an ideal 
society. Here subject and object are at least, it might 
seem, upon equal terms. We who pursue a common call- 
ing exist as servants of our Sache; and this cause — our 
science, our art, our learning, our creative process, what- 
ever it be — this exists by virtue of our choice, and of our 
work. Meanwhile, if this is not your calling, you must not 
ask, as from without, what this " cause' ' of ours is good 
for. Our art is just for art's sake ; our learning is its own 
reward. Our cause is indeed objective; we serve it; we 
sacrifice for it ; but it is its own excuse for being. If you 
want to attain the right type of self -consciousness, find 
such a cause, make it yours, and then serve it. 

The phase of consciousness suggested lies very near 
to the mind of a scholar such as Hegel ; near also to the 
thoughts of the artists and the students of a time such 
as his. Beyond pleasure seeking, beyond the sentimental 
scheming of reforms, beyond youthful knight-errantry, 
lies a type of self-consciousness with which many a 
strong man has long been content. This type involves a 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
calm love of a definite calling, which seems to be pursued 
unquestioningly and just for its own sake. What does 
one want, after all, but just an absorbing life task ? So to 
live is to find the self which is also an universe. 

In explaining the dialectic of this type of conscious- 
ness Hegel shows all the skill of the reflective man who 
is confessing the only too natural defects incident to his 
own calling. And no reader can doubt the thoroughness 
of the confession. For no sentimental dreamer of the 
foregoing romantic types fares worse under Hegel's dis- 
section than does the type of the scholar or the artist 
who defines the self in terms of the "cause," and who 
thereupon can say nothing better of the "cause" than 
that it is its own excuse for being. Such an ideal Hegel 
finds wholly accidental and capricious, and shrewdly 
notes that what the scholars and artists in question really 
mean by their pretended devotion to the ' ' cause ' ' is that 
they are fond of displaying their wits to one another 
and of showing their paces and of winning applause, and 
with a touch of the old savagery about them are also 
fond of expressing contempt for the failures of other 
men. The actual behavior of these devotees of the 
cause is described in paragraphs of a character- 
istically dry humor. The learned author or the con- 
fident artist, vain of his toilsome scholarly or creative 
task, first puts all his powers into it ; then feels sure, in 
his own mind, that this is indeed a great piece of work, 
since, after all, the self is in it; and hereupon, with an 
elaborate display of modesty, he solemnly explains in his 
preface or in letters to his friends that he knows how 
little he has done. Yes, he has done a mere nothing. He 
has only wished to show, by his poor essays, his devotion 
to the cause, of which he is but the humblest of servants. 

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DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
Such is his honorable way of appearing objective. Here- 
upon, like flies, the critics settle upon the now publicly 
visible work. They too protest their devotion to the cause. 
Wholly in its service, and of course not because of their 
condescending vanity, nor yet because of their own ill- 
suppressed but malicious glee, they either loftily praise 
and approve, or else, if they can, tear to pieces the 
worthy or unworthy work. Of course the author listens 
disenchanted. And of such is the kingdom of those who 
have no justification for their life task except that it is 
a life task. What they are busy in pleasing, is their own 
vanity. They merely call it an objective task. 

Hegel 's title, prefixed to his sketch of this type of con- 
sciousness, sufficiently summarizes his view. It runs: 
"Das geistige Thierreich und der Betrug, oder die Sache 
selbst." We may freely translate: "The Intellectual 
Animals and their Humbug; or the Service of the 
Cause/ ' Few more merciless sketches of the pedantry 
and hypocrisy that may take on the name of objectivity 
and of devotion, have ever been written. For Hegel had 
grown up im geistigen Thierreich amongst the intellec- 
tual animals and he knew them to the core. 

VI. 

Yet, once again, the result of this dialectic is positive. 
The ideal of the intellectual animals is in fact a sound 
one. Their hypocrisy lies merely in pretending to have 
found this ideal in art for art's sake, or in learning for 
learning's sake. Suppose that there indeed is a task 
which is not arbitrarily selected by me as my task, and 
then hypocritically treated as if it were the universal 
task which I impersonally serve. Suppose that the gen- 
uine task is one forced upon us all by our common nat- 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
ural and social needs. This then will be "die Sache," our 
work, our life, whether we individually admit the fact 
or no. Against the magnitude of this common task, the 
individual's service will then indeed be as nothing, and 
the individual, when he notes this, may frankly admit 
the fact without any hypocritical posing. On the other 
hand, this task will furnish for each man his only pos- 
sible true self-expression in terms of human action. Is 
there such a task, such a Sache f Hegel replies in effect : 
Yes, the consciousness of a free people, of a Volk, of an 
organized social order, will constitute such an expression 
of selfhood. To each of its loyal citizens, the state whose 
life is that of such a people will be his objective self. 
This his true self then assigns to the individual his pri- 
vate task, his true cause, gives dignity and meaning to 
his personal virtues, fills his heart with a patriotic ideal, 
and secures him the satisfactions of his natural life. Here 
at last in this consciousness of a free people, we have — 
no longer crude self -consciousness, no longer lonely seek- 
ing of impossible ideals, and no longer the centering of 
the world about the demands of any one individual. In 
this consciousness of a free people each individual self 
is in unity with the spirit of the entire community. And 
herewith the world of the Geist begins. All the previous 
forms were abstractions, fragments of life, bits of self- 
hood. In history they appear as mere differentiations 
within some form of the life of the Geist — as mere 
phases of individual life which involve, as it were, a sleep 
and a forgetting of the unity upon which all individual 
life is based. An organized social order is the self for 
each one of its loyal subjects. The truth of the individual 
is the consciousness of the people to which he loyally 
belongs. 

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, 



DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 

The pathos of these words, written as they were at a 
moment when Hegel himself was very much a man with- 
out a country and when already the invader's heel was 
on the soil of Germany, suggests to us that the Geist also, 
thus hopefully introduced, is to have its dialectical ex- 
periences, and its forms of disillusionment. As a fact, the 
tale of the Geist is more of a tragedy than is that of the 
individual life. 

The first type of the Geist is that of the small but 
already highly developed state, as was, for instance, the 
ideal Grecian commonwealth — so small that its citizens 
feel near to one another, while this state is so highly de- 
veloped as to value its own freedom and to demand defi- 
nite loyalty from every subject. 

The problem of such a social order, as of every social 
order, is of course the maintaining of the equilibrium 
between individual rights and social duties. This is for 
Hegel simply the problem of subject and object in its 
social form. The commonwealth is conscious in and 
through its individuals; but they, as loyal subjects, view 
themselves as its expression and instrument. So each of 
the two members of this relation, the consciousness of the 
commonwealth and that of the individual, may in turn 
be regarded as the true subject and as the true object of 
the social world. As in Schelling's doctrine of the self, 
however, the relation involved proves to be unsymmetri- 
cal and hence, in each finite form, unstable. 

In the ideal small commonwealth, however, the prob- 
lem as to the relation between the individual and the 
social order does not yet appear as a direct conflict be- 
tween the personal rights of one who is in the modern 
sense a free citizen, and the public rights of the govern- 
ment. For in this stage the loyal individual is, in ideal 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
at least, essentially devoted to the filling of his social 
station whatever that is. He has conscious rights only by 
virtue of this station. The modern notion of individual 
rights is a much later evolution. Hegel uses as his illus- 
tration of this form of social consciousness, not 
the literal history of the Grecian commonwealth (for 
that is clouded, he thinks, by accidental motives), but 
rather the ideal view of a commonwealth which he finds 
presented in the Greek heroic tragedy — especially in the 
CEdipus trilogy of Sophocles. It is notable that at the 
moment we are reminded of an essentially analogous sit- 
uation by what we nowadays hear of the social ideals of 
old Japan,* where individual rights were apparently 
conceived wholly in terms of social station. 

In such an ideal commonwealth — the ideal heroic social 
order of the Greek tragedy — or the analogous ideal of 
old Japan, the antithesis between the individual and the 
social order is represented by the conflict between family 
piety and the demands of the existing rulers of the state. 
In other words, the social order here exists in a two-fold 
form, as the family and as the government. The family 
interest here centers, however, about its devotion to its 
dead. The individual, while living, is friend or foe of the 
state, and has value for society only as such. But as a 
dead member of the family, the individual has absolute 
rights, which are recognized through funeral ceremonies 
and through ancestor worship. Hence the possibility of a 
conflict between family piety and the demands of the 
state — a conflict upon which the tragedy of Antigone is 
based. Hegel illustrates the conflict at length, in the form 

* A remarkable illustration of this Gestalt is contained in ' ' The 
Story of the Forty-Seven," in Tales of Old Japan, collected by 
A. B. Mitford.— Ed. 

202 



DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
which might appear trivial in its detail were not a reader 
of our day reminded, by what he hears of Japan, of the 
manifold ways in which patriotism and family honor, the 
duties of daily life and the reverence for the dead, seem 
there to have stood in various antitheses and to have 
involved tragic conflicts. The essence of such tragedies, 
according to Hegel, is that loyalty is divided in twain, 
into loyalty to the underworld — shadowy, mysterious, 
but absolute — and loyalty to the visible government, 
whose commands are explicit, but are of today. The laws 
of the underworld are socially binding. They are not 
of today or of yesterday. No man knows whence 
they came. But the visible social order is insistent and 
authoritative. One can resist it only by a deed which in- 
volves fault. That such fault must occur, even when the 
wrongdoer is innocent of any but the most loyal inten- 
tion — this is the Fate of this stage of social conscious- 
ness, and is typified by the tragic fault of one who, like 
(Edipus unwittingly slays his father, and weds his own 
mother, but who even thereby becomes the ruler of the 
state ; and is again typified by the deliberate yet fatally 
necessary fault of Antigone, who with womanly piety 
takes sides with the underworld and performs her duty 
to her dead brother in defiance of the will of the ruler. 

In brief, the ideal commonwealth lives through an un- 
consciousness as to what its own inner doubleness of loy- 
alty means. It is unstable. Its only resource is in exercis- 
ing its loyalty through active conflict with other states. 
But warfare breaks down the simpler form of society, 
and inevitably leads over to the next great stage of social 
development — the stage of Imperialism. 

The imperial social order is one in which the antithesis 
of public and of private rights is explicit and is delib- 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
erately adjusted through a system of laws. The ideal 
purpose of these laws is to secure to every man his own, 
while the laws themselves are administered by a sov- 
ereign power, the state. The state, no longer a common- 
wealth whose dignity is instinctively recognized, a so- 
cial order to which loyalty is a natural and inevitable 
tribute, needs to be symbolized to the eyes of the subject 
by the definite will of an individual, the personal sov- 
ereign. The first conflict is now between his will, which 
as the will of an individual is arbitrary, and his true vo- 
cation, which is to enforce just laws, securing thereby to 
every subject property and personal rights. A second 
conflict appears between his will and the equally arbi- 
trary will of a subject. Family piety gives place to mili- 
tarism. One has duties no longer to the dead, but solely 
to the living. Justice is the ideal; but arbitrary enact- 
ment is the fact. And the conflict, as fatal as it was in the 
original social order, is no longer the mysterious conflict 
between the underworld and the visible authorities. It is 
the explicit conflict of law and order on the one hand, 
caprice and accident on the other. In this conflict the 
sovereign and his subjects are equally involved. The 
state is at once a necessity and an oppression to all. No- 
body can either permanently endure any one form of 
government or do without it. In the imperial world the 
spirit thus exists estranged from itself, but bound never- 
theless to live and to develop through this estrangement. 
It is essentially a social mind, but is also a social mind 
whose expressions are as unstable as they are mighty. 

The one resource of the spirit, under these conditions, 
is self-cultivation — the education of the civilized con- 
sciousness to a full comprehension of the problems of the 
social order. We need not undertake to follow here the 

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DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
stages through which, in Hegel's account, this education 
of the social mind passes. The forms of cultivated in- 
dividualism heretofore discussed are themselves phases 
of consciousness which arise in the course of this train- 
ing. The skeptical discovery that the state appears to 
exist simply as the embodiment of the selfish will of its 
subjects, and that loyal professions are mere cloaks for 
individual greed, the growth of a corrupt use of political 
power even by virtue of the growth of the general social 
intelligence, the conflict of the social classes — these are 
phases in the great process of the cultivation which the 
social mind gives to itself. These phases culminate in the 
consciousness which the Enlightenment of the eight- 
eenth century represents. Society is indeed necessary, 
but it exists solely for the sake of forming, nourishing, 
and cultivating, free individuals. Utility is the sole test 
of social truth. All that is real exists simply in order to 
make men happy. Whatever principle underlies this 
world-process is an unknowable Supreme Being. Visibly 
true is only this, that what tends to the greatest good of 
the greatest number of individual men is alone justified. 
This, then, is what we have been seeking. This is wis- 
dom's last social word. Away with all arbitrary laws and 
sovereign powers. Away with loyalty to anything but the 
common rights of all men. "We are all free and equal. 
The Geist has been transformed into the multitude of 
free and equal individuals. Let the people come to their 
own. 

Herewith, then, comes the Revolution, the absolute 
freedom — and the Terror. For the horde of individuals 
thus let loose are whatever they happen to be. The will 
of all is indeed to be done. But who shall do it ? The sov- 
ereign ruler? But the sovereign is dead. The representa- 

205 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
tives of the people? But these are now free individuals, 
with no loyalty that they can any longer define in 
rational terms. The only way for them to become con- 
scious of the universal will is to express their own will. 
They mean of course to do whatever brings the greatest 
happiness to the greatest number. But they have now no 
test of what is thus to be universally useful except what 
is furnished by the light of their own personal experi- 
ence. Their subjective decision they therefore impose 
upon all others. Thus they become a faction, appear 
as public enemies, and are overthrown. Society has re- 
turned to primitive anarchy, and exists once more as 
the war of all against all. 

VII. 

The Geist, so far, has failed to find, in the literal social 
world, in the political realm, any stable union of its sub- 
jective and objective aspects. The lesson is, not that the 
old individualism was right, but that the true social 
order needs a higher embodiment. In the literal political 
world, the Geist is indeed able, in Hegel's opinion, to 
take care of its own, so far as the conditions will permit. 
It will not tolerate anarchy. It will resume some type of 
relatively stable social constitution. But here, after all, 
it has no abiding city. 

The " empire of the air" remains, however, still to 
conquer. And Hegel hereupon depicts, in terms derived 
from Kant and Fichte, what he now calls the moral 
theory of the universe of the spirit. Upon this stage the 
mind, still aware of its essentially social destiny, now 
undertakes to define the reality as a certain eternal and 
ideal order which is valid for all rational beings — the 
city of God, whose constitution never passes away. This 

206 



DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
higher and eternal realm, where the moral autonomy of 
every free agent is guaranteed even by virtue of his ac- 
ceptance of a moral law that he conceives as binding for 
all rational beings, is as true as it is shadowy and full of 
antitheses. On earth this ideal moral order can never be 
realized, for on earth we see only phenomena. Only 
the noumenal free moral agents, whose dwelling lies be- 
yond time and space and beyond phenomena, can create 
that city of God and can consciously dwell therein. Yet 
we mortals have worth only in so far as, by our deeds, 
we actually take part in the creation of that perfect 
moral order. The real universe — this moral realm — the 
divine order that lies beyond sense, will infallibly ensure 
the triumph of this absolute right, whatever we poor mor- 
tals do. Yet we are free moral agents precisely in so far as 
the universe needs our free and loyal deeds in order to 
aid in the triumph of the right. Unless we are free moral 
agents, the moral world has therefore no meaning. But 
if we are free agents, then we can sin and so can en- 
danger the triumph of the right. 

Such is a suggestion of the paradox of one who tries 
to solve our problem by conceiving the true triumph of 
morality as belonging to a wholly supersensuous world. 
The city of God is in vain defined as merely a city out 
of sight. The self in vain seeks its expression in a world 
of which, by hypothesis, it must remain totally uncon- 
scious, so long as it remains human. The Kantian-Fich- 
tean moralische Weltanschauung is thus but a fragment 
of the truth, a higher and social form of the " unhappy 
consciousness, ' ' which seeks its fulfilment in another 
world. 

But still another form of this moral theory of reality 
remains. Perhaps the spirit is actually realized not 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

through what we accomplish, but by the simple fact that, 
on the highest levels we intend to be rational. Perhaps 
the readiness is all. Perhaps the triumph of the self in 
its world simply takes the form of a ceaseless determina- 
tion, in spite of failure and of finitude, to aim at the 
highest, at complete self-expression, at unity. Perhaps 
the curtain is the picture ; perhaps the will is the deed ; 
and perhaps in the end the spirit, like a higher sort 'of 
"intellectual animal,' ' contents itself with merely say- 
ing, "I have accomplished nothing, but at least I have 
tried my best. ' ' So to conceive the solution is to take the 
position of some of Hegel's contemporaries, to whom, as 
formerly to Lessing, the search for the truth is all that 
can be viewed as accessible or as really worthy. This, in 
fact, is curiously near to Hegel's own form of Absolu- 
tism; but is also curiously remote from it. 

For if, at last, it is the pure intent to be reasonable 
that constitutes reasonableness, if the whole life of the 
spirit, individual and social, exists only as an aim, an 
idea, an attitude, a purpose, still one has to remember, 
as one looks back over this long story of error and de- 
feat, that every deed in which the self was expressed 
was, in its measure, a falling away from its own intent — 
was an expression of illusion, was a finite mistake, and, 
if conscious, was a sin against the ideal. 

What consciousness so far learns, then, is that finite 
defect, error, sin, contradiction, is somehow of the very 
nature of the self, even when the self seeks and means 
the highest. Every effort to find and to express the per- 
fect self is ipso facto a lapse into imperfection. The pure 
self cannot be expressed without impurity. The rational 
self cannot be expressed without irrationality. The ab- 
solute purpose, to be the self and to be one with one's 

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DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
own world, is realizable only through a continual inner 
conflict and a constant transcending of finite failures. 

To see this, however, is also to see that it is not in the 
failures themselves, but in the transcending of them that 
the true life of the spirit — of the self — comes to be in- 
corporated. And Hegel here expresses this by saying that 
it is not the consciousness of sin but the consciousness 
of the forgiveness of sin that brings us to the threshold of 
understanding why and how the true self needs to be ex- 
pressed, i.e., through a process of the conscious overcom- 
ing of the defects of its own stages of embodiment, 
through a continual conquest over self-estrangements 
that are meanwhile inevitable, but never final. 

To give this very view of the nature of the self, and 
of the relation between perfection and imperfection, 
finitude and the infinite — to give this view a genuine 
meaning, we must turn to that still higher form of the 
social consciousness which is historically embodied in 
religion. 

VIII. 

Religion may be defined, so Hegel says, as the con- 
sciousness of the Absolute Being. In other words re- 
ligion is not, like the foregoing, the effort of one who be- 
ginning with his own individual self -consciousness as the 
center of his universe, tries to find the place of this in- 
dividual self in his world. Religion is rather the con- 
sciousness which is seeking to express what the Absolute 
Being, the universe, really is, although, to be sure, re- 
ligion is inevitably an interpretation of the Absolute 
Being as seen from the point of view of the inquiring 
self. 

In history, religion has appeared as an attitude 
of the social consciousness towards the world. Religion 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
is, for Hegel, an interpretation of the world by the social 
self, and by the individual man only in so far as he iden- 
tifies himself with the social self. That is, the nation or 
the church or humanity has a religion. The individual 
man comes to a consciousness of his religion through his 
community with his nation or his church or with hu- 
manity. Religion as a purely private and personal ex- 
perience could only consist of such forms as the unhappy 
consciousness has already exemplified. 

The early forms of religion define the universe in 
terms of powers of nature. The unconscious idealism of 
the primitive mind appears in the fact that these powers 
tend from the outset to be conceived as living powers, 
which, in order that they may be viewed as sufficiently 
foreign and mysterious, are often typified by animals. 
Gradually the consciousness grows that human activity 
is needed in order that by suitable monuments, by vast 
constructions due to the worshippers themselves, the na- 
ture of the world-fashioning intelligence may be at once 
fittingly honored and, through imitation, portrayed. The 
result is seen in the vast architectural religion of Egypt, 
of whose true nature Hegel, when he wrote this book, had 
indeed small knowledge. Greek religious thought, con- 
ceiving its deities in human form, came nearer to a 
knowledge of the true relation of the Absolute and the 
finite being. The result was the religion of art, wherein 
the divine is portrayed by representing ideal types of 
human beings. But art, in humanizing the divine, inevi- 
tably tends also to humanize itself. In tragic poetry the 
gods gradually give place to mortal heroes; and poetry 
becomes consciously an imitation of human life. Comedy 
completes the process of this humanization. Man, who 
started to portray the gods, portrays, and in the end 

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DIALECTICAL PROGRESS 
mercilessly criticizes, merely men; and the ancient re- 
ligion dissolves itself in a humanistic skepticism. There 
are no gods. There are only men. The individual selves 
are all. This is the anarchical stage of religion. 

But the world itself remains — mysterious, all-power- 
ful, objective, the dark realm that this skepticism cannot 
pierce. The mythical personifications have turned into 
human fancies. Man remains on one side, the Absolute 
on the other. The one is self-conscious; but the other is 
the hidden source of self-consciousness, hopeless, baf- 
fling, overwhelming in its vastness. What form of con- 
ception can portray the now seemingly impenetrable es- 
sence of this Absolute, from which we creatures of a 
day seem to be now sundered as mere outer shells of 
meaningless finitude? 

There remains one form of the religious conscious- 
ness untried. It is, at this point in human history, 
ready to come to life. In a highly dramatic passage Hegel 
now depicts how about the birthplace of this new form 
of consciousness there gather, like the wise men from the 
East, some of the most significant of the Gestalten so far 
represented: Stoicism is there, proclaiming the dignity 
of the self as the universal reason, but knowing not who 
the self is; the unhappy consciousness is there, seeking 
its lost Lord; the social spirit of the ancient state is 
there, lamenting the loss of its departed spirit : all these 
forms wait and long for the new birth. And the new 
birth comes thus : That it is the faith of the world that 
the Absolute, even as the Absolute that was hidden, has 
now revealed itself as an individual man, and has be- 
come incarnate. 

This faith then holds not that an accidental individual 
man is all, but that the essential Absolute reveals itself 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
as man, and this is the first form of the Christian con- 
sciousness. 

This form too must pass away. This visible Lord must 
be hidden again in the heavens. For sense never holds 
fast the Absolute. There remains the consciousness, first 
that the Spirit of God is ever present in his church, and 
then that the church knows — although indeed under the 
form of allegories — how the Absolute Being is complete 
in himself only in so far as he expresses himself in a 
world which endlessly falls away from him into finitude, 
sin, darkness, and error, while he as endlessly reconciles 
it to himself again, living and suffering in individual 
form in order that, through regaining his union with his 
own Absolute Source, he may draw and reconcile all 
things to himself. 

This, says Hegel, is the allegory of which philosophy 
is the truth. 



212 



LECTURE IX. 
HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM. 

THUS far, in our studies of Schelling's and of 
Hegel's early works, we have been illustrating the 
rise and, as one might say, the youth of the ideal- 
istic movement. We have examined some of the motives 
and methods of this youthful period of idealism ; we have 
contended with some of its difficulties. We have seen 
some of the relations of the philosophers to the civiliza- 
tion of that age. We must now make an attempt to indi- 
cate the form in which philosophical idealism reached its 
first maturity in the system of Hegel. 

I. 

After Hegel published the Phaenomenologie des 
Geistes, he was for some years forced by the political 
consequences of the battle of Jena to abandon his work 
as a teacher of philosophy. He continued, however, his 
efforts to formulate his system, and in 1812 began the 
publication of his Logik. Not until 1816 was he able to 
begin work as professor of philosophy at Heidelberg. In 
1818 he passed over to Berlin, where his career was con- 
tinued until his death in 1831. It was at Berlin that he 
soon became the recognized leader of a school; and for 
years his philosophy had an almost overwhelming promi- 
nence in the universities of Germany. 

The completed system of Hegel was outlined, during 
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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
his life, in his systematic treatise called the Encyclo- 
paedic der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Here he ap- 
pears as one attempting, like a modern Aristotle, the 
task of surveying the total result of human knowledge 
with reference to its unification in terms of an idealistic 
philosophy. 

It will be of interest to consider briefly in what spirit 
Hegel attempted this unification. You well know, by this 
time, the main conditions which an idealistic philosopher 
must have in mind in such an undertaking. For an ideal- 
ist the field of human knowledge is, as you will remem- 
ber, no mere report of the structure of a world that ex- 
ists in itself, apart from all our knowledge. On the 
contrary, our knowledge, whatever else it is, is an expres- 
sion of ourselves. It is a revelation of the true nature of 
the human reason. If such an idealistic philosophy suc- 
ceeds in giving an account of the universe, it will there- 
fore show that our human reason is in unity with the ulti- 
mate nature of things. That is, it will teach that this 
human reason is itself the embodiment, in various indi- 
vidual lives, processes, investigations, practical activities, 
opinions, theories — the embodiment, I say, of an Abso- 
lute Reason, while the world is the creation of this Abso- 
lute. The outcome of the Phaenomenologie has already 
indicated to us how, in Hegel's view, this embodi- 
ment of an Absolute Reason in the form of our human 
consciousness is to be interpreted. Let us review this out- 
come sufficiently to see how the resulting system of 
philosophy must be expressed, in case such a system is 
possible at all. 

The first result of the Phaenomenologie which here 
concerns us is the thesis that human error and human 
finitude are themselves a necessary part of the expres- 

214 



HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
sion of the absolute truth. To assert this thesis is char- 
acteristic of Hegel's form of idealism, and the whole 
system centers about this proposition. The proposition 
itself is identical with the assertion that the dialectical 
method is the true method of philosophy. When you be- 
gin to philosophize, you seek, very properly, to escape 
from errors and to find the truth just as it is. Hence 
errors, defective points of view, false opinions, seem to 
you simply regrettable incidents which you wish to es- 
cape. When later you discover, as Kant wishes you to do, 
that human thought is through and through burdened 
with tendencies to error, that phenomena only are known 
to you, not pure truth, you feel as if the purpose of phi- 
losophy had wholly failed. But Hegel undertakes to show 
that truth can only be defined by taking account, as it 
were, of a certain necessary totality of defective or er- 
roneous points of view. Or again, Hegel's account of the 
world might be defined as an assertion that the necessary 
and unified totality of the phenomena is itself the abso- 
lute truth ; so that there is indeed no truth to seek beyond 
the phenomena, while nevertheless no single phenome- 
non, and no finite set or circle of phenomena can consti- 
tute the truth. Errors, then, are but partial views of the 
truth. The partiality of such views is indeed regrettable, 
in case you remain fast bound in and by such a partial 
point of view. But if you learn to view the partial truths 
in their setting, then you see that without the par- 
tial truths the totality of the truth would be impossible ; 
.or, in terms of the dialectical method, you see that with- 
out the errors, the truth would be impossible. As Hegel 
boldly expressed the situation, in the metaphorical lan- 
guage characteristic of his early period, and of his Phae- 
nomenologie, "The truth is the Bacchanalian revel, 

215 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
wherein every one of the finite forms of the truth appears 
as an intoxicated illusion." (Die Wahrheit ist der Bac- 
chantische Taumel, worin alle Gestalten trunken sind.) 
No view of the nature of truth could appear more absurd 
if you approach the system unsympathetically, and from 
without. And that is why Hegel hoped to prepare the 
way for his system by writing the Phaenomenologie as an 
introduction. According to this book, common sense is, as 
a fact, dialectical and self -refuting, since it asserts the 
existence of a world of fact independently of its own 
thoughts, while common sense is still unable to define or 
to describe this external world except in terms of the 
categories of its own thought. So far Kant's analysis in- 
evitably brings us, as we deal with the problems that 
lead us over to idealism. Meanwhile, common sense, while 
thus theoretically at war with its own anti-idealistic con- 
ceptions, is all the while, in Hegel's opinion, practically 
idealistic, since every one of us naturally views the world 
as centered about his own personality, and conceives the 
nature of things pragmatically, that is, as possessing 
reality precisely in so far as this nature of things has 
value for his own conduct. Hence the common sense point 
of view at once says, ' ' The facts are the facts, whatever 
I may think, ' ' and also adds, ' ' What I have to conceive 
as true, I must regard as true ; for otherwise I have no 
basis for action, and no plan of conduct. ' ' 

Yet common sense, self -contradictory as it is, is an ab- 
solutely inevitable beginning for philosophy. "Whatever 
truth we are to come to see must, then, come to our knowl- 
edge through a process which involves, not the abandon- 
ment, but the supplementing of common sense — not the 
dropping of those errors which inevitably reassert them- 
selves whenever we move about as we do in the world of 

216 



HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
common sense, but the enlarging of our consciousness 
through an insight which shows those errors to be a nec- 
essary aspect and moment of the absolute truth. 

Not only is the point of view of common sense thus at 
once erroneous and necessary — a way to the truth, 
though leading through the very labyrinth where the 
monster of error dwells — but the same character of the 
truth, the same relative justification of error, has ap- 
peared at every stage of that progress of consciousness 
of which the Phaenomenologie is supposed to be the 
record. The series of stages of consciousness which Hegel 
has traced is, according to him, substantially inevitable. 
It is indeed not necessary that the individual man should 
in each case literally repeat in his personal life, the 
march over the long road of error through which the hu- 
man race has so far found its way. That is, the individual 
man need not first, like the savage, kill his enemies in 
order to learn how self-assertion is possible only in social 
forms ; he need not be a master or a slave, a monk, or a 
Faust, an anarchist or a loyal subject of an ancient Greek 
commonwealth, in order to learn the truth that was in- 
corporated in each of these forms of life. But that is 
because, these forms of life having actually expressed 
their truth and having paid the penalty of their errors, 
each by asserting itself, and then by passing away, the 
individual man can learn their lesson in a more or less 
abstract way, and so can use this lesson in defining higher 
grades of insight. Hegel, however, insists that without 
the actual expression, in living form, of the lower type 
of consciousness, the higher type could not find its own 
expression. The essence of this higher life is to be the 
truth of the lower stages ; and so in general it is of the 
essence of all truth to be the truth of some error, the 

217 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
goal which that error was seeking. Hence the Absolute 
exists only as the truth of the lower and of the relative; 
the infinite exists only as the truth of the finite ; the per- 
fect can be real only as the fulfilment of what is sought 
by the imperfect. 

II. 
A second result of the Phaenomenologie is, in Hegel's 
opinion this : Since each imperfect stage of consciousness 
is an interpretation of the whole real universe from some 
limited or finite point of view, and since each such inter- 
pretation is led over from its own lower stage to the next 
higher stage of consciousness by a process of what might 
be called immanent self-criticism — a process whereby 
each stage comes to a self-consciousness regarding its 
own purposes and its own meaning — it follows that the 
method of philosophy must consist in a deliberate and 
systematic development of this very mode of self-criti- 
cism of the processes and attitudes of consciousness. In 
the Phaenomenologie we found that Hegel simply ac- 
cepted from experience the historical fact that certain 
types of human character, of social life, and of religious 
consciousness, exist or have existed. We found him, after 
accepting from without, as it were, these forms, there- 
upon applying his dialectical method to each of them in 
succession, and so showing how each form was dialectical 
and was therefore inadequate to express its own inmost 
purposes. We then found him at the close of such dia- 
lectical history of a stage of consciousness, looking about 
him, as it were, in experience and in history for a form 
or type of consciousness which should express some 
higher phase of the truth and of insight. Such an appli- 
cation of the dialectical method characterized his intro- 
duction to philosophy. But herewith we found indeed 

218 



HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
but a fragmentary expression of what, to Hegel's mind, 
the dialectical method must become when applied to the 
proper business of the philosophical system itself. The 
change which must characterize, for such a thinker, the 
transition from his introduction to his finished system, 
thus becomes fairly obvious. 

The system of Hegel must do for our fundamental 
ideas of truth, for the necessary categories of the mind, 
and for the answering of our various questions about 
truth and reality, what the Phaenomenologie undertook 
to do for the various stages whereby the human mind has 
approached the philosophical point of view itself. Has 
our thought a certain necessary nature? Are our true 
categories only the expression of some one fundamental 
principle of reason ? Is the nature of things an expression 
of the reason? Is the variety of human selves an inevi- 
table manifestation of the one Absolute Reason ? Are Na- 
ture and Mind different stages in the manifestation of 
this one Reason? Such, as you know, are the questions 
which a system of Hegel 's type proposes to answer in the 
affirmative. And you are now prepared to understand at 
least in a general way, the motives which led Hegel to 
undertake this answer by means of a repeated and, in 
fact an unweariedly persistent application and reappli- 
cation of his dialectical method. 

Hegel, like his predecessors, conceives the whole na- 
ture of things as due to the very principle which is ex- 
pressed in the self. But now, as the Phaenomenologie 
has especially taught us, the self, in Hegel's opinion, is 
through and through a dialectical being. It lives by 
transcending and even thereby including its own lower 
manifestations. Every finite form that it can take exists 
only to be transcended, but even thereby exists to be in- 

219 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

eluded in the self's complete life. The self sins, but only 
to repent its own sin, by attaining through this very re- 
pentance a renewed moral vigor. It dies; but only to 
rise on stepping stones of its dead selves to higher things. 
It errs, in order thereby to illustrate the truth which is 
richer than the error. The Phaenomenologie has merely 
illustrated this general process. The mature system shall 
define the same process in exact and technical terms, and 
in these very terms shall apply the resulting conception 
of the self to explaining the whole world as due to the 
very principle which the self embodies. This, then, is 
Hegel 's philosophical ideal. 

III. 

Meanwhile, as we also know, this form of idealism will 
undertake to deduce the variety of the categories of our 
thought from a single principle. And this principle, in 
Hegel's case, will again be the self. Consequently Hegel 
will attempt to show how the various fundamental con- 
ceptions which the human mind uses in the processes 
exemplified by the various sciences are themselves stages 
in the formation and in the expression of self-conscious- 
ness. These stages will be united in a series by ties of the 
same sort as those which, in the Phaenomenologie, bound 
together the various Gestalten des Bewusstseins. The 
various categories of our human thought, such as being, 
change, quality, quantity, measure, thing, property, con- 
tent, form, internal, external, causality, substance — the 
fundamental conceptions, in brief, which we use in our 
various sciences as our tools for comprehending the na- 
ture of things — these will be, for Hegel, one and all of 
them stages in the self-expression of our thoughtful ac- 
tivity — Gestalten, as it were, of the thinker's life. Each 

220 



HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
category will be necessary in its place and for its own 
purpose. But no one of them, by itself, will have absolute 
validity, unless indeed the name for their total system, 
the Idee itself as the Absolute Idee, shall be viewed as 
itself one of these categories. Each category, each idea 
such as quality, quantity, etc., shall be limited — a neces- 
sary, but an abstract, and in so far as it is merely ab- 
stract, an untrue expression of the total nature of things. 
As the master or the slave, as the stoic or the monk, as 
the pleasure seeker or the intellectual animal, as each of 
these types both was and was not the true self, was the 
self under a limitation, but therefore was not the whole 
self, and so had to give place, in the evolution of life, to 
a truer Gestalt; so too it will prove to be the case with the 
categories. Each special category will be the truth, but 
not the whole truth of things. Each, then, will find its 
truth in later categories. But the last category, which 
will end the systematic list and which will thus close the 
series, will express the truth only in so far as it explicitly 
includes in itself the totality of all the other and previous 
categories; precisely as the Absolute Life, of which the 
close of the Phaenomenologie gave us a hint, exists only 
as differentiating itself into the totality of the finite 
Gestalten, as expressing itself in them, and so forgiving 
their finitude just because the wealth of its own perfec- 
tion dwells in their totality. 

IV. 

In a way similar to that in which Hegel develops his 
system of categories, he must undertake also, in accord- 
ance with his principles, to deal with the problem of the 
nature of the real world, with the relations of the phys- 
ical world and the mind, and with the origin and with 

221 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
the social and historical connections of those various 
types of personality which the Phaenomenologie merely 
accepted as empirically given facts of life, and used there 
merely as illustrations of stages of consciousness. In deal- 
ing with the vast range of problems thus suggested, 
Hegel was obviously sure to meet with the severest test 
of the adequacy of the philosophical conceptions whose 
significance we have been sketching in the foregoing. It 
is one thing to use examples from human life as in- 
stances of the dialectical method. It is another thing to 
show in detail that by means of the sole principle that 
the nature of the Absolute is most completely expressed 
in the nature of the self, one can explain the necessity 
that the life of the Absolute should also be expressed in 
such an enormous wealth of forms as those which ex- 
ternal nature and human history present to our experi- 
ence. Yet the postulates which determined Hegel's gen- 
eral fashion of thought, and which the foregoing account 
has now brought to our notice, required him to undertake, 
although with certain express limitations, a task of this 
general nature. And his courage was equal to the enter- 
prise, so far as he was able to define to himself what this 
enterprise meant. It is fair, however, to note at once 
under what limitations and subject to what restrictions 
Hegel undertook his task of surveying the sum total of 
the results of the special sciences known to him, and of 
unifying these results by means of an application of the 
dialectical method. 

It is indeed unfair to suppose that Hegel regarded as 
the ideal business of philosophy to deduce a priori the 
necessity according to which the absolute nature of things 
must require, in consequence of its inevitable dialectic, 
the existence of each individual thing in nature or even 

222 



HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
of each law of the physical world, or of each kind of 
living creature, or of each event of universal history, or 
of each individual man or nation. People have often at- 
tributed to Hegel an extravagant a-priorism of this type, 
according to which every finite fact should be, in all its 
individual details, a necessarily required stage in the 
expression of the Absolute Being. In truth, Hegel was 
very far removed from such a view. It is true that he as- 
serted that whatever has genuine actuality is an expres- 
sion of the universal reason, which necessarily expresses 
itself in a totality of individual infinite forms. But with 
Hegel, each individual thing has a positive relation to 
universal reason, and so possesses genuine actuality, not 
in every respect, but only in so far as it is a significant 
fact. It is part of what he regards as the dialectic process 
of the Absolute Reason that, just as the one reason ex- 
presses itself in forms which are imperfect and finite, so, 
too, it should express itself in a wealth of forms whose de- 
tails are accidental as well as imperfect. The Absolute, in 
order to express itself fully, must, in fact, for the very 
reasons which the dialectic method emphasizes, triumph 
over the unreasonable. And one way in which the unrea- 
sonable appears in experience is in the form of the acci- 
dental, of the relatively chaotic. Hegel, therefore, is 
amongst the philosophers who emphasize the presence, in 
the finite world, of an element of what one may call ob- k 
jective chance. He explicitly insists upon this fact at the 
outset of his treatment of the philosophy of nature, in 
the Encyclopaedic; and whatever one may think of this 
doctrine he is profoundly unjust who attributes to Hegel 
a crass literalism in the application of the famous princi- 
ple: Alles Wirkliche ist Vernunftig. This Hegelian as- 
sertion means simply that whatever is the expression of 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
any essential principle, whatever, in other words, is in 
its detail genuinely necessary, is in the world for some 
good reason. That is, all true necessity is not blind but 
significant, is not merely fatal law but is the expression 
of reason. And wherever there is a good reason for the 
existence of any object in the world, Hegel's philosophical 
ideal indeed requires that philosophy shall undertake to 
tell what that reason is. Nevertheless, Hegel maintains 
upon characteristically dialectical grounds that, since 
reason is an active principle, finding its true place in the 
world as a process of conflict whereby it overcomes its 
own opponents, there is thus a good general reason why 
a great deal of what in each particular case is unreason 
should exist in the world to be overcome. Some of the 
forms of unreason we have already met with in our dis- 
cussion of the Phaenomenologie. We have seen why Hegel 
thought it reasonable that such instances of unreason 
should occur, and should be overcome. There are, then, 
unreasonable facts in Hegel's world. Such are needed in 
order to give to Hegel 's form of the reasonable principle 
its opportunity to triumph through its own activity. For 
we have seen how such triumph is significant. Hence, 
from Hegel's point of view, it is quite reasonable that 
particular instances of the irrational should be present, 
but to be overcome. If you hereupon consider any special 
instance of an unreasonable fact — a foolish sentiment, a 
passing mood, a particular superstition, a crime, a mob, a 
social catastrophe, or any one of the countless varieties 
of facts in the physical world — Hegel insists that such a 
fact, just in so far as it expresses no rational principle 
but is there merely as something for reason to overcome, 
has an element of brute chance about it, is objectively 
accidental. Reason requires in general that such facts 

224 



HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
should be found in the world, but not just this irrational 
fact. Hence philosophy has no call to " deduce' ' any sin- 
gle fact of this sort ; and for Hegel such facts are legion, 
throughout nature and the social world. Indeed Hegel so 
differentiates the vocabulary which he uses to name his 
categories as to enable him to express the sense in which 
less rational types of facts have their lower and rela- 
tively accidental grade of being in his idealistic world. 
A well-organized social order, for instance, has what he 
calls Wirklichkeit, i.e., genuine actuality. It is, namely, 
the visible or phenomenal and in so far relatively ade- 
quate expression of a rational principle. But a chance 
phase of the social order — a panic, a mob, an audience 
in a theater — belongs to the world, not of actuality, but 
of bare existence. Hegel uses for such facts the term 
Existenz; i.e., they are not possessed of WirklichJceit. So 
too, in the physical world, the solar system has Wirklich- 
keit. But this stone that your feet stumble over in the 
dark is where it is in what Hegel regards as a relatively 
accidental way ; it is therefore merely an existent. 

Far then from being, as commonly supposed, an ex- 
travagant rationalist, who deduced all natural and social 
phenomena from a single principle, so that their detail 
might be regarded as predictable, Hegel believed, on the 
contrary, that he had deduced the necessity of the objec- 
tive presence of an irreducible variety of phenomena 
which were not further to be viewed as, in their individ- 
ual detail, rational. Accordingly one may charge Hegel 
rather with having too hastily overlooked the possibility 
of discovering a deeper reasonableness in many things 
which now appear to us to be accidental than with hav- 
ing been a merely blind partisan of the reasonableness 
of whatever happens. 

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LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
V. 

Within the limits thus set, Hegel is, however, 
committed to the undertaking of bringing all the posi- 
tive results of the sciences of his time, so far as he per- 
sonally understood them, into harmony with the funda- 
mental principles of his system. The existence of the 
physical world, its principal types of inorganic and of 
organic processes and forms, the relation between the hu- 
man mind and physical nature, the general character- 
istics of the human mind itself, its grades and types of 
mental activity, the relation of the individual to society, 
the types of social life, the general philosophy of law, 
the general course of human history, the problems of re- 
ligion — all the philosophical issues suggested by this cat- 
alogue of topics, Hegel undertook, in his system, to treat 
from his own point of view. He stands committed there- 
fore to the attempt to show how an Absolute Being, 
whose inmost nature is expressed in the ways which our 
study has now brought to our notice, requires the pres- 
ence in the world of all these various special modes of 
being. 

The principle of the entire system whereby this result 
is to be obtained, is now in outline known to us. The Abso- 
lute is essentially a Self — not any one individual human 
self, but a completely self-determined being, of whom 
our varied individuality is an expression. The Absolute 
expresses its life in forms which, if viewed in their most 
general types, are identical with those categories which 
we have mentioned. All these expressions of the Absolute 
are in accordance with the principles of the dialectical 
method. Finite beings, as the dialectical method shows, 
have in themselves, in case they are viewed by a false 

226 



HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
abstraction apart from their source, a self -contradictory 
nature. The law of finite being is : Every finite thing in 
heaven and earth, when taken alone, contradicts itself, 
that is, illustrates what Hegel calls the principle of neg- 
ativity. That is, again, no finite being exists in itself, or is 
in itself intelligible. The Infinite then, the Absolute Be- 
ing, when taken in its true nature, is indeed the only 
reality. But the infinite, the Absolute Being, that which 
lies beneath and is embodied in all finite selves, cannot 
be taken or viewed as merely infinite. To view it thus 
would again be to contradict one's self. For so viewed it 
would be nothing — like the pure self of the Hindoos. 
The infinite, then, exists only as differentiated into the 
totality of its finite expressions. It is what Hegel calls 
the concrete infinite. It can be only in so far as it reveals, 
expresses, embodies, surrenders itself, and so becomes — 
not indeed exclusively any one finite thing, but the total- 
ity of the finite. It is beneath the finite only in so far as 
it is expressed in and through the finite. It is the totality 
of the finite viewed in its unity. The forms wherein this 
infinite reveals itself may still be viewed, however, first 
abstractly and apart from their concrete expressions. 
They are the categories, the necessary forms of thought. 
We can discover these, can develop them by means of the 
dialectic method ; for we ourselves, not in our mere sep- 
arate individuality, but in our rational consciousness as 
forms of the self, are identical in nature with the Abso- 
lute Being. To discover the categories is at once to define 
the true nature of the self, and to show how the Absolute 
Being, which is identical in nature with the basis of all 
selfhood, can alone express itself. The complete expres- 
sion of the Absolute, that is, the ways in which these cate- 
gories get a live expression, we find in outer nature with 

227 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
its wealth of forms. Each of these forms in which natural 
objects appear is in its essence rational; but in its special 
expression each natural form is finite and so is also ac- 
cidental. Nature, in fact, is a phenomenal embodiment of 
the categories — an embodiment which exists just be- 
cause the Absolute, in order to be true to its own dia- 
lectical nature, must first express itself in what appears 
to be an external and foreign form, even in order to win, 
through the conquest over this form, a consciousness of 
its own complete self-possession. But again, the Absolute, 
if viewed as conquering its natural or apparently for- 
eign form of expression, in order thereby to win a con- 
scious self-possession, constitutes, in contrast with ex- 
ternal nature, the world of finite minds. A finite mind 
is a process whereby the Absolute expresses itself 
as some special instance of a conflict with nature, with 
chance, with the accidental. Through this conflict, 
through vicissitudes such as the Gestalten of the Phae- 
nomenologie have already exemplified, the Absolute wins 
a consciousness of its conquest over its own self-aliena- 
tion. For, as Hegel repeatedly insists, the only way in 
which self -consciousness can attain its goal is through 
such a conquest over self -alienation, through a becoming 
finite, through suffering as a finite being, through encoun- 
tering estrangement, accident, the unreasonable, the de- 
fective, and through winning hereby a self-possession that 
belongs only to the life that first seeks in order to find. 
Assuming a natural guise, being subject to finite condi- 
tions, the Absolute wins in human form its self-posses- 
sion at the moment when it comes to regard this human 
life as an embodiment of an absolute, that is of a divine 
life. 



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HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
VI. 

The consciousness that our natural and finite life is the 
mode of expression which is necessary for the very ex- 
istence of an Absolute or Infinite Life takes, according to 
Hegel, three shapes — those of art, of religion and of 
philosophy. Art presents the union of the finite with the 
infinite by displaying a phenomenal object which directly 
appears as expressing an absolute ideal. Religion knows 
the fact of this union of the finite and the infinite in a 
still higher form, but expresses this knowledge in alle- 
gorical, in imaginative forms. Philosophy with the full- 
est consciousness of the necessary truth of the process, 
deduces and realizes the necessity of the existence of an 
Absolute Being, and the further necessity that this being 
should be expressed in the form, first of an active proc- 
ess, and then of a process which takes shape in the 
rational lives of conscious beings. 

Art appeals to direct perception, and so involves no 
proof of the revelation which it actually gives of the 
union of finite and infinite. The proof which religion 
gives for its view of the unity of God and man, of abso- 
lute and of finite, takes the form of the faith of an or- 
ganized body — in ancient civilization, the faith of an or- 
ganized nation, in modern civilization the faith of a 
church. There are lower and higher forms of religion. 
But in any case, religion normally expresses itself in the 
conscious relation of a socially organized body of be- 
lievers to that divine life which expresses itself to them 
and in them. In the religious consciousness, the Absolute 
Being becomes, in fact, aware of itself in and through 
finite conscious beings. This religious self-consciousness 
of the Absolute reaches its highest form in the Christian 

229 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
consciousness, which Hegel believed himself to be ex- 
pressing with substantial accuracy. 

On the other hand, the self -consciousness of the Abso- 
lute reaches its remaining and most explicit form in 
philosophy, where the proof of the propositions involved 
consists, as we have now seen, of three essential parts : 

1. The general idealistic proof that thought and be- 
ing, as Hegel loves to say, are identical. This means that 
a being whose nature is other than that which the in- 
ternal necessity of a rational thinking process requires 
and defines, is impossible. 

2. The explicit deduction of the categories which 
express the nature of thought, and so the ultimate nature 
of reality. 

3. That application of the dialectical method already 
so largely illustrated by our study of the Phaenomenol- 
ogie. This application proves, according to Hegel, that 
truth can only be expressed as a synthesis of various 
views which, if taken in their abstraction, are self -con- 
tradictory, while their synthesis itself is harmonious. 
Viewed otherwise, the same method makes clear that no 
finite being and no finite truth can exist or be defined in 
itself, and apart from the totality of truth; while, on 
the other hand, the infinite being, the Absolute, which is 
simply this totality of dialectically organized truth, can 
exist only as expressed in finite form. 

Whenever these propositions are brought clearly and 
in their true synthesis into consciousness, then and there 
the Absolute Being, which is precisely what the self at 
once aims to be, and in principle is, becomes conscious 
of itself. The individual man who thinks becomes aware, 
not that his natural individuality is of any importance, 
in its accidental character, as a means of determining 

230 



HEGEL'S MATURE SYSTEM 
truth, but that in him the Absolute Being has become and 
is conscious of itself. 

The philosophical and the religious consciousness, phe- 
nomenally, exist as events in time. They are expressions, 
however, of a process which must be viewed not as tem- 
poral but as eternal. In human philosophy and in hu- 
man religion, the Absolute temporally appears as being 
at a certain moment what he in fact timelessly is, con- 
scious of himself. For in the Absolute all the dialectical 
stages which time separates, are eternally present 
together. 



231 



LECTURE X. 

LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM AND ITS 
PRESENT POSITION. 



I 



N this concluding lecture I shall indicate some of the 
motives which have determined the later history of 
idealism, and the present position of that doctrine. 



I. 

The textbooks of the history of philosophy describe 
with greater or less fulness the processes which led, after 
Hegel's death, to the dissolution of his school. These 
processes are not without their great importance when 
considered with reference to the general history of Eu- 
ropean civilization in the nineteenth century. Unfortu- 
nately, however, the fortunes of the Hegelian "school" 
are less enlightening than we could wish concerning the 
genuine merit either of Hegel's own doctrine or of 
idealism in general. The questions that Kant had raised, 
and that the intermediate idealistic systems had after all 
quite inadequately developed, were not thoroughly con- 
sidered upon their merits in the course of the contro- 
versies that attended the divisions and the final dissolu- 
tion of the Hegelian school. There is no disrespect to 
German scholarship involved in asserting that the for- 
tunes of university controversies in Germany are seldom 
wholly determined by an absolutely just and thorough- 
going consideration of the merits of the issues which 

232 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
form the topic of such controversies. So soon as a school 
has been formed, and so soon, therefore, as the for- 
tunes of the members of such a school are bound up with 
their success or failure in getting or in keeping the atten- 
tion of the academic public, extraneous motives are intro- 
duced into the life of scholarship. The influence of a 
school may give for a time undue weight to the published 
words of its members. The consciousness that there is a 
school sometimes leads for a while to an unprofitable 
devotion to merely external forms of expression, such as 
have come to characterize the members of the school. 
When opposition arises and begins to be successful, it 
leads only too frequently not only to a rejection of the 
current formulas of the school which is opposed but to a 
tendency to believe that if one abandons the formulas, 
one may henceforth simply neglect the thoughts that lay 
behind them. Hardly anything in fact is more injurious 
to the life of scholarship in general, and especially of 
philosophy, than the too strict and definite organization 
of schools of investigation. The life of academic scholar- 
ship depends upon individual liberty. And above all does 
the life of philosophy demand the initiative of the indi- 
vidual teacher as well as that of the individual pupil. 
A philosophy merely accepted from another man and not 
thought out for one 's self is as dead as a mere catalogue 
of possible opinions. Philosophical formulas merely re- 
peated upon the credit of a master's authority lose the 
very meaning which made the master authoritative. The 
inevitable result of the temporary triumph of an appar- 
ently closed school of university teachers of philosophy, 
who undertake to be the disciples of a given master, leads 
to the devitalizing of the master's thought, and to a 
revulsion, in the end, of opinion. People with any orig- 

233 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
inality and independence of life pass on to new interests. 
The school becomes not an organization but a mere speci- 
men preserved as in a museum, a relic of what was 
formerly alive. That was what happened before very 
long to so much of the Hegelian school as undertook to 
remain true to the mere tradition of the master. 

Furthermore, new issues came to occupy the public 
mind as the nineteenth century proceeded. Theological 
issues due in part to the new development in the history 
of religion, new scientific discoveries occurring all over 
the field of empirical research, new political interests, 
which brought men out of sympathy with the political 
conservatism of Hegel's later years — all these motives 
combined to make men feel that Hegel 's methods, identi- 
fied as they were in most men 's minds with Hegel 's com- 
plex and ill-understood technical vocabulary, and so with 
the mere formalism of the system, were inadequate to 
cope with the new needs. Hegel's own confidence of tone, 
his air of superiority, his far too manifest willingness to 
regard his own formulations as final, led to a natural 
revolt. And because Hegel's form of idealism had been 
the most definite and for a while the most successful, 
the public mind confused its revised estimate of the 
value of Hegel's formulas with a supposed discovery 
of the inadequacy of the entire result of the early post- 
Kantian idealism. Men became increasingly suspicious 
of philosophical formulation, increasingly hopeless of 
success in the construction of philosophical systems, and 
increasingly devoted, for several decades after 1830, to 
special researches in the rapidly advancing and various 
branches of minute scholarship on the one hand, and of 
natural science on the other. 

Yet the influence of early idealism has indeed never 
234 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
passed away from European thought. As we saw in our 
opening discussion, this influence has been Protean, and 
has appeared in the most various places. So far as tech- 
nical philosophizing is concerned, the most definite influ- 
ence to which later thought has been subjected, is the 
influence of a more or less modified Kantianism. And as 
thus modified, the Kantian doctrine has always tended to 
express itself in the form of what one might call an em- 
pirical idealism, — an idealism of which the movement 
called "pragmatism" or " humanism," in this country 
and in England, is a more or less definite instance. An 
empirical idealism accepts, in the first place, so much of 
Kant's original doctrine as insisted that our knowledge 
is limited to phenomena. It then, in general, recognizes 
that our interpretations of phenomena involve no merely 
passive acceptance and report of data whose origin is 
wholly external to ourselves and indifferent to the inter- 
ests of our own intelligence. At the very least our knowl- 
edge of the world involves, and in part depends upon, 
our own way of reacting to the world. A reality which 
has nothing to do with the life of our own intelligence, 
and which is so external to us as to be entirely independ- 
ent of whether we know it or not, is indeed, from the 
point of view of such an empirical idealism, meaningless 
and to be neglected. To say that experience is our guide, 
is to admit with Kant that the conditions which deter- 
mine the unity and the connectedness of our own experi- 
ence are conditions in terms of which we are obliged to 
interpret reality; so that what we call real is inevitably 
adjusted in some sense to the demands of our intelligence. 
The recognition of this general thought appears in the 
most manifold shapes in modern discussion. Positivists 
and radical empiricists, formulators of new religious 

235 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
doctrine and investigators of the logic of science, evolu- 
tionists and various modern types of mystics, are thus 
found in often decidedly unconscious agreement which 
lies beneath their most marked differences. This agree- 
ment relates to the fact that our world is not merely 
given to us from without but is interpreted from within, 
so that what we mean by reality is always more or less 
idealized by us, that is, interpreted in terms of our own 
reason, even when we are ourselves most resolved to be 
passive and to accept the hard facts as we find them. Side 
by side with the question of Locke, "What are we men 
fitted to know?" philosophy must always face the ques- 
tion, "What is fit to be known?" And in terms of the 
latter question every theory of reality, however ten- 
tative, however skeptical, however radically empiris- 
tic it tries to be, will always more or less consciously 
be determined. What I regard as the permanent tri- 
umph, not of any one idealistic system, but of the 
idealistic spirit in the history of human thought, is indi- 
cated whenever a man tries to tell you what his view 
about the real world which our sciences study and 
our industrial arts endeavor to conquer, seems to him to 
be. One who states his view may believe that he is a hard 
and fast realist. But in modern times one of the reasons 
upon which he is likely to insist, will be one upon which 
President G. Stanley Hall has insisted in his book on 
Adolescence. This reason will be that a faith in the real 
world, as being something independent of the minds of 
us fallible mortals, is the only wholesome doctrine, the 
only corrective of the intellectual excesses of youth, the 
only safeguard against visionary and possibly morbid 
waywardness. But whoever expresses himself thus an- 
nounces an explicitly idealistic theory, since he defines 

236 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
the nature of reality in terms of his ideal of wholesome- 
ness. President Hall has his idea of what a healthy youth 
ought to be. This ideal demands that a youth, or anybody 
who teaches philosophy to the youth, should view the 
world in a certain way. This shows that the view in ques- 
tion is true. Hence, in substance, the real world is such 
as to embody the ideals of President G. Stanley Hall. 
These are robust ideals unquestionably ; but the man who 
interprets his world in terms of them is a philosophical 
idealist, although it is part of his creed that he must not 
admit this fact even to himself. Such is a characteristic 
instance of the ways in which the idealistic tendency ap- 
pears in modern thought. It has a character similar to 
that which Hegel in the Phaenomenologie attributed to 
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Modern idealism, 
like that former rationalism, is a sort of universal 
and often secret infection. Whoever contends against 
it shows that he is already its victim. He is under- 
taking to determine by his own rational ideals what 
the real world genuinely is, that is, how it ought to be 
conceived. By virtue of his very reasoning he confesses 
that the question, ' ' How ought I to conceive the real ? ' ' is 
logically prior to the question, "What is the real itself ?" 
And as a recent German writer, Professor Rickert, has 
pointed out, the ought is prior in nature to the real, or 
the proposition : ' ' I ought to think thus, ' ' is prior to the 
proposition : ' ' This is so. ' ' This whole view of the prob- 
lem of reality is one which is characteristic of idealism. 
This is why the idealistic movement in later European 
thought, although frequently suppressed, although often 
deliberately ignored, has been as constant as the move- 
ment of a great river beneath masses of winter ice. 
Every now and then the ice breaks or melts, and the 

237 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
idealistic tendency comes to the light of consciousness. It 
is irrepressible, because it is human. It is true, because 
truth itself is inevitably an ideal, which cannot possibly 
be expressed except in ideal terms. One who has become 
aware of this universal significance of the idealistic 
tendency, becomes indifferent to that general hostility 
towards either philosophy or idealism which is so often 
expressed by the unreflective. Let anybody tell you 
why he refuses to interpret his world in idealistic terms 
and he at once confesses his latent idealism; for he can 
express himself only by defining his ideal of scientific 
method, or by confessing his practical attitude towards 
the universe. In either case he defines his real world in 
terms of his ideal. His account may be in itself adequate 
or inadequate ; in any case he is an idealist. Let him say, 
as is most customary, that he rejects all a priori ideas of 
things, because experience is his only guide, and you 
have only to ask him what he means by experience to 
discover that he accepts as belonging to the range of 
human experience a vast collection of data which he him- 
self has never personally experienced and never 
hopes to experience. For however carefully I observe, my 
observations are but a fragment of that experience of 
mankind in terms of which I am constantly interpreting 
my own personal experience. Not only is the experi- 
ence of mankind indefinitely wider than this one man's 
experience, but the experience of mankind is also some- 
thing that, in its totality or in any of its larger con- 
nections, is never present in the experience of any one 
man, whoever he may be. How then does any one of us 
know what human experience, on the whole, verifies or 
proves? I answer, "We accept as human experience what 
certain social tests require us to regard as validly re- 

238 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
ported, as significantly related to our own observation, 
as such that it is reasonable to view this as experience, 
although we ourselves do not directly verify the fact that 
it is experience. Our conception of human experience 
is, therefore, itself no directly verifiable concept. It is 
determined by certain ideal motives which common sense 
defines in terms of reasonableness, and which the most 
exact scientific method can never define in other than 
distinctly ideal terms. It meets the need of our thinking 
processes to accept as empirical fact a great deal that we 
do not ourselves verify but believe other men to have 
verified.' ' What William James calls "the senti- 
ment of rationality' ' guides every such acceptance of 
other men's experience. The most radical empiricism is, 
therefore, full of idealistic motives. What it accepts as 
the verdict of experience is accepted in accordance with 
the demands of a certain sentiment of rationality, whose 
validity we have from moment to moment to accept on 
the ground that it would be unreasonable, that it would 
run counter to our ideal of truthfulness, not to accept 
this validity. I am of course not arguing that whatever 
phase a given individual chooses as his guide from mo- 
ment to moment is a valid guide. I am merely pointing 
out that no criticism of the faith that customarily guides 
men can reduce it to a purely empirical test ; because no 
empirical test can be applied unless we use some form 
of faith, some sentiment of rationality, in terms of which 
we define and accept something or other as constituting 
the experience of mankind. Philosophy must indeed 
criticize as thoroughly as it is able the various tests that 
we actually use, the various faiths upon which men act, 
the Protean forms of the sentiment of rationality. What 
I insist upon is that such a criticism must itself in the 

239 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
long run be guided by a conscious rational ideal, which 
when it becomes conscious must appear as the ideal of 
our own intelligence, of the self that speaks through us, 
of the reason of which we are the embodiment. Hence 
whoever appeals to experience, or to any other test re- 
garding what is real, inevitably interprets the world, 
whether of external reality or of human experience, in 
terms of the demands which his own rational conscious- 
ness formulates. In other words, whoever has a world at 
all has it as the expression of ideal demands which his 
intelligent self when it comes to consciousness formulates 
as its own. 

For my part, therefore, I am fond of hearing men 
formulate a condemnation of the principles of idealism. 
The more definitely they formulate their condemnation, 
the more explicitly do they define their world as the ex- 
pression of their own ideal regarding the way in which it 
is rational to think the world. Their voice is the 
voice of idealism, however much they may try to 
disguise it. They look straight outward; and thereupon, 
as it were, deny that they have any eyes, because they 
see no such objects about them. They assert that the world 
is in essence independent of the motives which lead them 
to formulate their assertions ; but when asked why their 
assertions are true can only name again these motives. 
They say, "This is my thought." Yet they deny that 
reality is in any wise essentially related to the expression 
of thought. They possess then, in the concrete, the spirit 
of idealism. I welcome them as exponents of this spirit. 
They simply lack self -consciousness as to what their posi- 
tion is. And this lack is, after all, very much their own 
affair. 



240 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
II. 

So far I have pointed out only the most general 
way in which an idealistic tendency finds its place in 
recent thought. The idealistic character of recent 
philosophy will be present to consciousness in so far as 
influences, amongst which Kant's Critique of Pure Rea- 
son is in many ways the most prominent, have made us 
apt to reflect upon the presuppositions of every inquiry, 
and upon the way in which every formulation of the 
results of thought, however empirical in its detail, must 
receive its form from the ideal interests which consti- 
tute the essential character of our own reason, and which 
also lie at the basis of our conduct. Such a general ideal- 
ism remains, so far, characteristic of the spirit of 
modern thought rather than constitutive of any one 
system of philosophy. As soon as one attempts to formu- 
late this idealistic spirit in any series of propositions 
about the world of our experience and about its interpre- 
tation in terms of the rational ideals which guide our 
thinking and our conduct, great opportunities arise for 
a divergence of opinions regarding the constitution of 
this world, and for different ways of emphasis regarding 
the relative importance of the various interests by which 
our estimate of the world is determined. A philosophy is 
inevitably the expression of a mental attitude which one 
assumes towards life and towards the universe. This 
attitude is at once theoretical and practical — theoretical 
because it undertakes to define opinions concerning the 
nature of things, and practical because every effort to 
define opinions is essentially an expression of one's in- 
terest in the universe, and so of one's ideals of conduct. 
But every such attitude is inevitably colored by one's 

241 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
individuality. It is a person who interprets things. This 
person inevitably emphasizes some aspect of the world 
which nobody else emphasizes in the same way, and un- 
dertakes activities which are in some respects the activi- 
ties of no other person. Now if truth is ideally significant, 
and if ideals are always centered about individual per- 
sons, it will always be impossible to formulate philosoph- 
ical doctrines without leaving open the opportunity for 
a variety of individual formulation. This does not mean 
that the truth is at the mercy of private caprice, or that 
any man is his own measure of all things, without refer- 
ence to other men. It does mean that the whole of philos- 
ophy can only exist in an essentially social form, as the 
synthesis of many — yes, ideally speaking, of an infinite 
number — of individual and personal points of view, 
whose diversity will be due to the fact that the truth 
must mirror various aspects of its constitution in various 
ways in the diverse individuals. The world, in other 
words, interprets itself through us, that is, through what- 
ever rational individuals there are. The interpretations 
cannot be, ought not to be, monotonously uniform. If 
they were, they would simply be abstractions, and so 
would be monotonously inadequate and false. Inadequate 
our individual interpretations indeed always remain. But 
they need not be monotonously inadequate. They must 
properly supplement one another. 

The aim of philosophy is, then, the synthesis of these 
individual varieties of interpretation. Since synthesis 
depends first upon mutual understanding, and then upon 
mutual correction of inadequacy, our instrument as we 
aim towards synthesis must involve a constant effort 
to find what is common to various experiences, to 
various individual interpretations, to various thoughtful 

242 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
processes. Our empirical sciences depend essentially 
upon confirming one man's experiences by the experi- 
ences of other men; and therefore these sciences recog- 
nize as objective fact only what can be verified in com- 
mon by various observers. Similiarly our logical and 
ethical inquiries are concerned, although in another way 
than the one followed in empirical science, with the effort 
to define common and universal categories and laws 
which express the will of all men. But when the best has 
been done thus to discover the common features of our 
various experiences and ideals, a most significant aspect 
of the universe will have been inevitably omitted in every 
such investigation. And this will be precisely the aspect 
of individuality in the universe. If the world is essen- 
tially a life of will and of thought coming to an individ- 
ual consciousness of itself in and through various person- 
alities whose social unity rests upon their very variety, 
the work of discovering the truth can never exhaustively 
be reduced to the work of finding out what these various 
personalities find or will merely in common. They all in 
common mean, intend, experience, and think the uni- 
verse. They are all, therefore, as Leibnitz said, mirrors of 
the universe. But since the universe is, from this point 
of view, just the system of living mirrors itself, what is 
common to the various world-pictures is never the whole 
truth. Hence it is of the nature of a philosophy always to 
be in presence of problems which forbid a final system- 
atic formulation from the point of view of the individual 
philosopher, just because these problems are soluble only 
from the point of view of other individuals. Philosophy, 
needing especially, as it does, to take account of the vari- 
ety of individual points of view rather than of common 
features, is, therefore, much less able than are the empiri- 

243 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
cal sciences to define a settled result npon which further 
investigation may be based. When a length is measured, 
one is looking for what is common to various individual 
experiences regarding this length. That common element 
may be approximately determined once for all. And 
upon that result a scientific theory of physical facts may 
depend for further progress. A philosophy, however, is 
essentially concerned with an unity of truth which can 
only be expressed through the variety of individual 
points of view. Hence it does not define an abstract com- 
mon feature of various experiences as a fact upon which 
further research is to be founded merely by means of an 
accretion of further facts of the same sort. 

Thus everything in philosophy is properly subject to 
re-interpretation from new individual points of view. 
No sincere individual point of view is absolutely errone- 
ous, for every such interpretation is a portion of the in- 
terpretation which the universe gives to itself through 
the variety of individuals. On the other hand, every finite 
individual's account of the world is subject to re-inter- 
pretation and in the progress of thinking will doubtless 
become, so to speak, absorbed in higher syntheses. At any 
point in time the returns, so far as truth is concerned, are 
not all in. For countless individual interpretations have 
not yet been made, or are not now in synthesis. Hence 
philosophy is peculiarly subject to the reproach of being 
unfinished and unstable. But people do not reproach life 
with instability in the case where it furnishes us with 
novelty and with the opportunity for significant prog- 
ress. Truth is not merely capricious and subjective be- 
cause new individual expressions are needed to supple- 
ment every finite interpretation. It is the value and not 
the defect of philosophy that it proceeds not by mere 

244 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
accumulation of settled discoveries, but by a constant 
re-interpretation of the meaning of life.* 

III. 

When I now speak, therefore, of the unsettled prob- 
lems of idealism, I do so not in a spirit of mere skepti- 
cism, and not with the intent of merely confessing igno- 
rance, and still less with a disposition to assert in a 
dogmatic way just how I suppose these problems ought 
to be settled. I want rather to suggest some of the condi- 
tions upon which, as I suppose, our interpretation of 
these problems and of their relation to life, will be based. 

The unsettled problems of which I speak are of a na- 
ture which the foregoing discussion has already indi- 
cated. The first problem which the various forms of ideal- 
istic doctrine have endeavored to consider is one that in 
the later idealism, since Hegel 's death, became especially 
noticeable, although we have found Hegel dealing with 
it. It is the problem of the relation between the rational 
and the irrational features of reality. The world of our 
experience becomes a rational realm to us in so far as we 
can interpret it in terms of ideas that adequately express 
our own conscious purpose. Thus, in so far as I can count 
objects, and can operate with numbers which correspond 
to the results of such counting, the facts with which I 
deal possess for me what might be called the numerical 
type of reasonableness. In so far as I can measure phe- 
nomena and get exact results, and in so far as in terms 
of the results of former measurements I can predict the 
results of future measurements, I deal with a world of 

* In this whole discussion are foreshadowed some elements of 
the later theory of interpretation as expounded in The Problem 
of Christianity. — Ed. 

245 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
experience — a world of phenomena — which possesses 
quantitative reasonableness. In so far as I can get control 
of phenomena, as for instance our industrial arts get a 
very vast and socially significant control of the phe- 
nomena of human experience, so that we can define in 
advance what we want, and by doing a definite piece of 
work can attain the required results, our world possesses 
what may be called practical reasonableness. If we pass 
directly to the social realm, individual men show them- 
selves as reasonable in so far as they can learn to live 
and work together, not destroying or suppressing their 
individual varieties, but winning essential harmony even 
in and through these varieties. Now it is perfectly plain 
that for the civilized man a considerable portion of this 
world of experience has become a rational world. On the 
other hand, it is equally obvious that we are constantly 
in presence of what so far appears to us as an irrational 
aspect of our experience. There are phenomena which we 
cannot adequately describe and predict in terms of our 
processes of numbering or of measuring. There are 
countless phenomena, such as storms and earthquakes 
and diseases and criminal propensities, which we cannot 
as yet control. Social life is a constant contention with 
the unreasonable forces which tend toward social an- 
archy. The individuality of every man appears at once as 
the most reasonable and as the most unreasonable feature 
about him — the most reasonable because what we most 
value in humanity, what love most emphasizes, what our 
social longing most idealizes, what our rational passion 
of liberty most insists upon is the individual human 
being, so that whatever gives our reasonable life its 
value, its friends to love, its task to perform is something 
individual. Yet, on the other hand, the individuality of 

246 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
everybody appears also as the unreasonable aspect of 
human nature in so far as individuality means whim, 
caprice, waywardness, oddity, eccentricity — in brief, 
whatever about any human being involves rebellion 
against order and intrusion upon the will of one 's fellows. 
Thus our world of experience is a synthesis of what ap- 
pear to us at present rational and irrational features. 
The history of society, and in particular of religion, of 
science, and of philosophy, appears to us as a warfare of 
reason and unreason. The world is, then, at least in ap- 
pearance irrational in so far as it refuses at any moment 
to express our meaning, to embody the categories of our 
thought, to realize the ideals of our conduct, to permit 
the unity of consciousness to come into synthesis with the 
brute facts of sense and of emotion. Now what a realistic 
philosophy would interpret as the contrast between in- 
dependent facts and our subjective ideas, an idealistic 
philosophy must conceive as the contrast between the 
rational and the irrational elements or aspects of experi- 
ence and of life. 

In the history of idealism in the nineteenth century 
the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism ap- 
peared as the principal motive for the abandonment of 
systems such as Hegel 's, and for the tendency to attempt 
constantly new formulations of the idealistic conception 
of the universe. Hegel, especially as interpreted by the 
formalists of his own school, appeared to the generation 
which followed his death as an extreme rationalist who 
regarded the world as through and through the expres- 
sion of rational ideals which the philosopher could for- 
mulate. The idealistic opposition to Hegel later received 
its classical representation in the doctrine of Schopen- 
hauer. Schopenhauer, whose doctrine did not become in- 

247 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
fluential until after 1850, is the classical irrationalist of 
the rationalistic movement. For him, the universe has a 
two-fold aspect. It is the world as idea, that is, the world 
as consciousness defines and observes it. In so far, it is 
a world subject to the categories, or again on its highest 
level, it is the world as the artist views and portrays it. 
Thus, it is either a world subject to law, or a world in- 
stinct with beautiful types of life. So far, then, it is the 
world of reason, or at least of what we may venture to 
call ideally significant unity. But on the other hand, the 
world possesses quite a different aspect. It is the world 
of the will. The will is the principle of irrational desire, 
of unrest, of brute fact, of conflict. The world as will 
is always deeper than the world as idea. The world as 
idea is the world of forms, intellectual or artistic — the 
world as known to the rational inquirer, or to the con- 
templative artist. But the world as will is the material 
aspect of things, which appears in our experience as 
brute fact, as mere data, as the restless incompleteness 
of every phase of life. The world as will is essentially 
bad, base, unideal, incomprehensible, unfathomable. The 
world as idea is the world of the apparition of this in- 
comprehensible principle in forms which can either be 
understood or contemplated, but which can thus be un- 
derstood or contemplated only in their relative, their 
imperfect, or their merely phenomenal aspect. No ideal- 
ism can, therefore, hope to see the world as a rational 
whole. It is not a rational whole. Consciousness is merely 
a flickering light that shows to us in a more or less defi- 
nite form the beautiful surface of the waste ocean of the 
unconscious and irrational will. 

That this view expresses an aspect which experience 
constantly forces upon our attention, has just been 

248 






LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
pointed out. Schopenhauer was not alone in defining the 
outcome of idealism in such terms. Schelling, in his later 
period of thought from 1809, when he published an essay- 
on the nature of free will to the close of his career, em- 
phasized the presence of an irrational principle in the 
universe to which human caprice and the brute facts of 
experience are due. In later idealism, von Hartmann is 
a notable example of one who conceives the nature of 
things in terms of a fundamental irrationalism. The age 
of the doctrine of evolution, emphasizing as it has done 
the struggle for existence, has given weight to the con- 
siderations upon which Schopenhauer and von Hart- 
mann have insisted. 

IV. 
Closely connected with considerations of this type are 
those which must have been near to your minds as you 
followed my sketch of the Hegelican doctrine. Is the 
idealistic philosopher able to define in any sense a priori 
the constitution which things must have? Or is he, like 
the student of the special sciences, confined to interpret- 
ing the results of human experience ? Hegel was regarded 
by his contemporaries and successors as an extravagant 
apriorist, who endeavored to deduce the facts of nature 
and of history out of his own inner consciousness. In 
truth, Hegel made a sharp distinction between our learn- 
ing by experience as we do learn what occurs and what 
has occurred, and our interpreting, in the light of the 
categories of our philosophy, the total meaning of this 
result of experience. Hegel recognized that we learn of 
our world through experience, and that unless something 
is first present in experience and in life, it is useless for 
philosophy to try to interpret what this something 
means. But he had, on the other hand, an unquestionably 

249 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
extravagant disposition to regard his philosophical in- 
terpretation of the meaning of experience as actually 
adequate to the whole of it. Meanwhile, the form of the 
philosophical interpretation must, so he held, be inter- 
nally rational, that is, such as to make the connections 
clear to the philosopher as he proceeds. But this internal 
form of the philosophical system will in so far be 
a priori. Philosophy will thus be a reconstruction of ex- 
perience in terms which the inner necessity of things de- 
termines. Hegel's extravagant confidence was that such 
an interpretation had actually been accomplished by his 
philosophy. He did not suppose that if we had never 
been enlightened by experience we could deduce a priori 
the nature of the world. But he did suppose that experi- 
ence had at last attained a point of view from which it 
is possible to reconstruct, by an a priori method, pre- 
cisely so much of the meaning of experience as is in fact 
rational. 

However, as we have already seen, Hegel himself re- 
cognized a certain truth in irrationalism. It was an es- 
sential feature of his dialectical method that he should 
recognize such a truth. Reason is for him an active proc- 
ess. It therefore involves the aspect which Schopen- 
hauer emphasized as the will. For Hegel as for Schopen- 
hauer, the life of the will is essentially a life of contest. 
It is necessary that the will should be in conflict with its 
own opponent. But the opponent of the will is at any 
stage the irrational, the undesired, the unintended, the 
apparently brutal fact over which the will at each stage 
has to win its way by an act of conquest. Hence the dif- 
ference between Hegel and Schopenhauer is essentially 
this : Hegel insists upon the thesis that it is rational for 
the reason, being as it is both practical and theoretical, 

250 



LATER PROBLEMS OP IDEALISM 
to meet and to conquer an irrational element in its ex- 
perience. Or again, there is an a priori necessity that we 
should constantly meet in our finite experience with con- 
tents which we cannot as yet deduce a priori. To express 
it otherwise, there is an a priori necessity that the a 
priori demands of the reason should always find over 
against them an empirical element of brute fact which 
cannot be deduced a priori. In still other words, Hegel 
recognizes an element of objective chance in the nature 
of things. It belongs to the dialectic of his system to do 
so. In this way Hegel is indeed an apriorist. He is an ex- 
travagant apriorist, in so far as he is confident of the 
finality of his own interpretation of nature and of life, 
and in so far as he actually neglects a great number of 
facts upon which experience has taught the rest of us to 
lay great stress. But Hegel has a place for empiricism, 
and a place for the irrational in his system. 

It belongs to the spirit of the time that the later ideal- 
ism should emphasize, as every reasonable idealist now 
does, the constant claims of experience upon the phi- 
losopher. To recognize this is simply to point out that 
no individual interpretation can be final. On the other 
hand, every idealist must emphasize the fact that we can- 
not and do not move a step in our thinking without using 
the a priori, that is, without appealing to that which for 
internal reasons we consciously regard as the rationally 
thoughtful way of interpreting the present facts of ex- 
perience. I now recognize and acknowledge the existence 
of your minds as relatively external to my own mind. 
But this recognition, this acknowledgment, is not now 
for me a mere acceptance of a brute fact of sense. For 
your experience is just now no experience of mine. My 
acknowledgment that you are there in my world is an 

251 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
interpretation. And for this interpretation I can give no 
reasons which are not in part a priori, reasons definable 
in terms of an internal necessity which my consciousness 
makes manifest to itself in its own way. Similarly, my 
own past and my own future, the very existence of any 
world beyond the present, the assertion of any fact in 
heaven or in earth, depends indeed in part upon the 
momentary pressure of experience, but equally upon an 
internally necessary and a priori demand of reason. 

V. 

I have now briefly reviewed two great problems of re- 
cent idealism, that of the relation of the rational to the 
irrational aspect of experience, and that of the relation 
of empiricism and the acceptance of truth as a priori, 
that is, as internally necessary. No single formulation of 
an answer to either of these problems will ever prove, 
within the range of our human experience, to be ade- 
quate. For each problem will constantly present itself in 
new aspects as life and as individuality diversify. But 
already I have indicated the spirit in which I think we 
must always meet these problems. As a fact, both prob- 
lems involve a distinction of aspect. We must not con- 
found these aspects. Yet we must not divide the sub- 
stance of life into two different and ultimate sorts of 
truth or reality in order to be just to the diversity of 
aspect. 

First, as to the problem of the a priori. The whole 
world is indeed known to me by experience, precisely in 
so far as experience restlessly awakens me to the fact that 
there is something still before me to acknowledge and 
something still before me to do. But the whole world is 
inevitably denned by me at any instant a priori, in so far 

252 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 

as my present experience is meaningless except with ref- 
erence to facts which I regard as past or as future, or 
as yonder in time or in space, as matters of possible ex- 
perience, not just now verifiable, as matters belonging to 
other individual lives than mine, as contents finding 
their place in a certain conceived order of things. The 
only warrant for such acknowledgment of what is not 
given must be found by me in a priori terms, and must 
be ultimately warranted by the consideration that unless 
I acknowledge a realm of facts not now verified by me, 
I simply contradict myself and reduce my experience 
to a meaningless chaos. From this point of view, your 
laboratory man, or your field naturalist, or your business 
man in the market place or your man of common sense, 
or even your light-hearted child at play, is as much an 
apriorist as the philosopher. For all these dwell in a 
world that is to them no mere datum, but a construction. 
This is the eternal truth of Kant's deduction of the cat- 
egories. This is the true sense in which the universe is 
interpreted by everybody as the expression of the more 
or less conscious demand of the rational self. In this re- 
spect the world is always a conceptual construct, in other 
words, a world known a priori. The ultimate warrant for 
such an interpretation is always the principle of contra- 
diction, the principle of inner necessity. For St. Augus- 
tine long ago formulated the matter: If I assert that 
there is no truth, I assert that it is true that there is no 
truth, and consequently contradict myself. But my truth 
is always my interpretation of my situation, and is thus 
in its form a priori, although its matter is determined by 
whatever feelings, images, sensations and interests I 
chance to find uppermost at any moment of my indi- 
vidual life. "We are all therefore both empiricists and 

253 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
apriorists. And whenever you find a man condemning in 
a sweeping way all a priori construction as inadequate 
to discover the constitution of the hard and fast realm 
of facts, you will always find upon looking closer that 
what he then means by his hard and fast world of facts 
is known to him just then in terms of a conceptual con- 
struction which he then and there acknowledges upon 
a priori grounds. I am very willing, then, to hear people 
condemn the a priori ; for I notice that they do so upon 
a priori grounds. 

A closely analogous consideration must guide our at- 
titude towards the other problem, that of the relation be- 
tween the rational and the irrational aspects of the 
world. The fact, for instance, that my friend is dead, and 
that I shall never see him in this world again, or that 
popular tumult rages in Russia in irrational madness, 
may be to my mind an opaque and in so far an irrational 
fact. Yet I always acknowledge that fact, save from this 
moment outward, as something whose reality is acknowl- 
edged by me upon rational, that is, internally necessary 
grounds. My world of fact is to me, therefore, at once 
rational and irrational. It at once expresses my meaning, 
fulfils my rational demands, and disappoints me, limits 
me, forces upon me what I do not now comprehend. But 
I further observe, that my acknowledgment of the irra- 
tionality of a fact is always an instance of the inade- 
quacy of my comprehension of that fact. My conflict 
with the fact is at the same time a conflict with the im- 
perfection of my own insight. There are facts which at 
first appear to me irrational, such as the puzzling condi- 
tions to which I must conform when I learn the rudi- 
ments of a new art. Yet when I learn the art, I learn to 
control and thus to rationalize the very facts that I also 

254 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
learn to acknowledge as real. "When one learns to ride 
a bicycle, there are moments, perhaps days, when 
nothing appears so irrational as the physical behavior of 
this unaccustomed object, which falls over when you 
move with the intention of keeping it upright, and runs 
towards what you most try to avoid. Later on, through 
conflict, this unreasonableness of the object becomes 
transformed into its controllable trustworthiness of law- 
ful behavior. Facts may, therefore, be relatively irra- 
tional, their irrationality meaning simply my imperfect 
insight into my world, my imperfect possession of my 
own principles of conduct. The problem of irrationality, 
like the problem of evil, which is an instance of the prob- 
lem of irrationality, always comes to us so joined with 
the problem of our own inadequacy of knowledge that 
we can never tell how far a supplementing of our insight 
will lead us to an acknowledgment of the reasonable- 
ness of what we first find unreasonable. But you may 
very rightly say that thus the problem of the unreason- 
able becomes transferred to ourselves, and the question 
why we are so finite, so ignorant, and so unreasonable 
still remains insoluble. But here appears a considera- 
tion which our historical sketch has especially prepared 
us, in this closing summary, to estimate. 

The dialectical method, as we remember, has especially 
insisted upon the fact that the practical life of the spirit 
depends upon developing and overcoming opposition. 
One may regard this doctrine of the older idealists either 
as an empirical generalization from historical and psy- 
chological phenomena, or as an a priori rational prin- 
ciple. For reasons which I have indiciated in the fore- 
going, I myself regard it as possessing equally both of 
these characters. The value of antithesis and of conflict 

255 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 
is verifiable empirically in very numerous instances. Not 
only does the will actually seek conflict, as both Hegel 
and Schopenhauer emphasize; but despite Schopen- 
hauer's insistence that such voluntary conflict belongs 
to the merely irrational side of the will, we must main- 
tain with Hegel that extremely lofty rational interest 
both of the will and of the whole spiritual nature are 
such as to demand the presence of conflicting motives 
and even of essentially tragic contests in all the higher 
spiritual life. The truth, whatever it is, is certainly not 
expressible in merely abstract, or in merely harmonious 
terms. If it is the truth of life, i.e., if the truth is a living 
and not a merely bloodless realm of abstract categories, 
then the truth must involve issues, struggles, conquests, 
and conquests over aspects of life that, when viewed in 
their abstraction, are distinctly evil and irrational. If 
once this principle, which Hegel's Phaenomenologie so 
richly illustrates, is admitted as essentially valid, then 
it is surely difficult to estimate the extent to which the 
existence of apparently irrational elements and facts 
can exist in the world not merely as forming an excep- 
tion to the reasonableness of things, but as facts which 
seen, as it were, from above, and in their genuine unity 
with all other facts, are actually essential to the unity of 
things and to the rationality of the universe. From this 
point of view it seems at least possible to say that the 
union of rational and irrational or evil facts in the uni- 
verse at large is itself, when the universe is taken in its 
wholeness, an essentially rational union, so that the evils 
are there to be conquered simply because otherwise the 
triumphant reasonableness, which from an absolute point 
of view is expressed in such conquest, would be impos- 
sible. Perhaps, then, just as all knowledge is empirical 

256 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
and all knowledge of significant facts is inevitably also 
a priori ; so now we may say that the world is a rational 
whole, and yet any finite fact in it, if viewed in its iso- 
lation, if viewed with forgetfulness of its relation to the 
absolute point of view, may to any extent be evil and ir- 
rational. The narrow life may be base ; yet through a con- 
quest over this baseness the larger life with which this 
narrow life, as an expression, is bound up may be tri- 
umphantly rational. 

VI. 
The suggestion of any such thesis brings us to another 
question, the last which we have time to consider. Ideal- 
ism has appeared in recent thought partly as pragma- 
tism, insisting that all truth is practical, that is, is true 
by virtue of its practical relation to some finite need. For 
many thinkers, pragmatism is essentially opposed to an 
absolutism which suggests, or perhaps positively main- 
tains, that the world in its wholeness has an absolute 
constitution in the light of which all finite truth must be 
interpreted. Now I myself am far from pretending to 
possess any peculiar revelation as to what the content of 
absolute truth may be. But I do maintain that a pragma- 
tist to whom whatever is true, is true relatively, that is, 
with reference to some finite need or definition, is actu- 
ally as much in need as I am of attributing to his world 
whatever constitution it actually possesses. Truth meets 
needs ; truth is also true. Of these two propositions I con- 
ceive idealism to be constituted. If one attempts to de- 
fine a world of merely relative truth, this world, as soon 
as you define it in its wholeness, becomes once more your 
absolute, your truth that is true. In acknowledging 
truth we are indeed meeting, or endeavoring to meet, a 
need which always expresses itself in finite form. But 

257 



LECTURES ON MODERN IDEALISM 

this need can never be satisfied by the acknowledgment 
of anything finite as the whole truth. For, as Hegel well 
insisted, the finite is as such self -contradictory, dialec- 
tical, burdened with irrationality. It passes away. Mean- 
while it struggles with its own contradictions, and will 
not be content with acknowledging anything less than its 
own fulfilment in an Absolute Life which is also an abso- 
lute truth. That many are not conscious of this need, I 
agree. Most men have no great amount of consciousness 
with regard to anything. But that all are discontent with 
their finitude, is a matter of common experience. I inter- 
pret this as implying, and as inevitably implying, that 
it is the truth that every finite life actually finds its ful- 
filment in an Absolute Life, in which we live and move 
and have our being. I maintain, and have elsewhere at 
length argued, that to attempt to deny this Absolute Life, 
is simply to reaffirm it under some new form. That the 
Absolute Life has to be conceived as the absolute union of 
experience and of rational necessity, of freedom and of 
law, of infinitude and finitude, of what we regard as ir- 
rational and of what we view as rational, I have else- 
where maintained at length. I am not here to preach my 
own doctrine. But I may assert that personally I am both 
a pragmatist and an absolutist, that I believe each of 
these doctrines to involve the other, and that therefore 
I regard them not only as reconcilable but as in truth 
reconciled. 

Herewith, in sketching these problems of later ideal- 
ism I have also suggested what I take to be the present 
position of idealistic doctrine. And herewith, in conse- 
quence, the wholly fragmentary and illustrative task of 
these present lectures is completed. Something may have 
been gained by these fragmentary discussions, if they 

258 



LATER PROBLEMS OF IDEALISM 
have suggested that idealistic philosophy is not merely a 
collection of eccentric opinions held by lonely students, 
but despite the eccentricity and the loneliness of many 
of the phases of its formulation, is not only in essential 
sympathy with the rational study of experience and with 
the practical ideals of life, but is at least unconsciously 
what I hope it will more and more consciously become, 
the expression of the very soul of our civilization. For 
we all not only gather but interpret experience. And to 
interpret experience is to regard facts as the fulfilment 
of rational ideals. And we all not only .accept life but 
try to conquer its irrationality, and to idealize its fini- 
tude. So to act is essentially, whether we know it or 
not, to view the temporal as the symbol and the likeness 
of the eternal. 



259 



i i M ii'" i »'i" .''.■'■ "■! !■ ' I aaaa— — m 



_ 



INDEX 



Absolute, The, 54; social mo- 
tives explaining its use, 55; 
concept of, Lecture III, pas- 
sim ; as problem for the post- 
Kantians, 71 ff . ; in relation 
to theology, 75; as Schill- 
ing's " Identity" or "Indif- 
ference, ' ' 133 ; art as the ap- 
parition of, 134; nature of, 
in Hegel 's Phenomenology, 
167 ff.; Hegel's theory of, 
as evolutionary and non-tem- 
poral, 170; characteristics of, 
in contrast with finite self, 
174 ff.; in terms of the reli- 
gious consciousness, 209 ff . ; 
in relation to Hegel's theory 
of truth, 215 ff . ; as Idee, 
221 ; as life and truth, 257 ff. 

Adolescence, by Stanley Hall, 
236. 

"Animals, The Intellectual," 
in Hegel 's Phenomenology, 
196 ff. 

Antigone, 203. 

Antinomies, 56, 80, 154. 

Antithetical Method. See Dia- 
lectical Method. 

Aristotle, 46, 214. 

Art, Schelling 's interpretation 
of, 121, 134; Hegel's view of, 
210, 229. 

Attention, 26. 

Baldwin, J. M., 127 f. 
" Beobachtende Vernunft," in 
Hegel } b Phenomenology, 189. 



Bradley, 2, 110. 

Browning, 140 f . 

Byron, 83 f . ; quoted, 192 f . 

Carlyle, 147. 

Categories, 19 ff. ; in relation to 
experience, 25, 32 ff., as a 
priori forms, 45; Aristotle's 
table of, 46; Hegelian, 174, 
220 ff. 

Causation, Kant's category of, 
20. 

Cervantes, 195. 

Christian mystics, 75. 

Conciousness, as stage in the 
Phenomenology, 150; its va- 
rious G est alien, 151 ff. ; its 
meaning defined, 156; nature 
of absolute, in Phenomenol- 
ogy, 167 ff . ; theoretical and 
practical stages of, 171 ff. ; 
social character of absolute, 
175; savage, illustrated, 176; 
of master and slave, 177 f . ; 
of stoicism, 179 ; the unhappy, 
180 ff. ; analysis of pleasure- 
seeking, 190, of the roman- 
tic reformer, 193 f., of the 
knight -errant, 195, of the 
' ' intellectual animals, ' ' 195 
ff.; social types of, 199 ff.; 
religious, 209 ff. 

Contradiction, characteristic of 
dialectical method, 89; in 
self -consciousness, 90 ff . ; in 
relation to truth, 94 ff . ; not 



261 



INDEX 



blunders, 95 f. ; in Hegel 's 
Phenomenology, 151 ff.; in 
Hegel's theory of truth, 
214 ff. 

Cousin, V., 2. 

Critique of Practical Reason, 
37, 39. 

Critique of Pure Reason, sig- 
nificance of its title, 65; in- 
fluence on recent philosophy, 
241. See also Deduction of 
the Categories. 

Dante, 192. 

Deduction of the Categories, 
key to post-Kantian idealism. 
Lecture I, passim; summary 
of, 24 ff.; four distinct ideas 
of, 31 ff. ; need of supplement- 
ing, 47 ff . ; revision of, by 
post-Kantians, 49 ff . ; sug- 
gesting dialectical method, 
90 ff.; dialectical, in Hegel's 
Phenomenology, 145; truth of, 
253 ff. 

Deism, 70. 

Dialectical Method, The, The 
Concept of the Absolute and, 
Lecture III, passim; prelimi- 
nary analysis of, 77 ff.; in 
relation to Platonic dialogues, 
78 f. ; to Kant's antinomies, 
80 f . ; exemplified in litera- 
ture, 82 ff . ; belongs rather to 
will than emotions, 83 ff . ; in 
relation to pragmatism, 85 f. ; 
in Schelling, Lecture IV. 
passim; in relation to ideal- 
istic theory of self-conscious- 
ness, 90 ff.; as a theory of 
truth, 94 ff.; Fichte's formu- 
lation of, 96 ff . ; exemplified 
in nature, as seen by Schell- 
ing, 101 ff.; as exemplified 
in Schelling 's analysis of the 



self, 105 ff . ; in Hegel 's Phe- 
nomenology, 143 ff.; negativ 
ity as the principle of, 154; 
in relation to Hegel's Abso- 
lute, 169; in relation to 
Hegel's theory of truth, 
214 ff. 

Diogenes, 179. 

Don Quixote, 163, 195. 

Egypt, 210. 

Encyclopaedic, Hegel's, 214. 

Error, place of, in Hegel's phi- 
losophy, 214 ff. 

Evolution, 3, 65; Schelling 's 
theory of, 103; in Hegel, 170. 

Existent, category of, 225. 

Experience, in English philos- 
ophy, 8; Kant's analysis of, 
12 ff.; not an empirical con- 
cept, 15 f. ; in relation to 
1 ' conceptual construction, ' ' 
16 ff., to Kant's categories, 
19 ff., to a virtual self. 22: 
as synthesis, 25 ff . ; conditions 
of possible, 27 ff., 34. 

Faust. Goethe's, 6S. 82, 14S, 

163,186, 189 f. 
Fechner. 2. 
Fichte, 63, 6S. 96 ff.. 125, 

132, 136, 141, 143, 154, 158, 

160, 206 f. 
Fitzgerald, 180. 
Forgiveness of Sin, Hegel's 

view of, 175 f. 
Freedom of the will, Kant's 

postulate of, 39. 

Galileo, 52. 

Germany, her mental life be- 
tween 1770 and 1805, 66 ff., 
141 ff . ; scholarship in. 232 f . 

Geschichte der Deutschen Phi- 
losophic, by Zeller, 137. 



262 



INDEX 



Gestalten des Bewusstseins, in 
Hegel's Phenomenology, 151 
ff. ; in relation to categories 
of thought, 220 ff. 

Gladstone, 89. 

Goethe, 68, 83 f., 147 f., 163, 
190. 

Green, T. H., 2. 

Hall, G. Stanley, 236 f . 

Hamlet, 150. 

Haym, 137. 

Hegel, his political conserva- 
tism, 137; some biographical 
facts about, 141 f . ; formal 
statement of his philosophy, 
156; quoted on the "Un- 
happy Consciousness, ' ' 185; 
mature system of, Lecture 
IX, passim; a modern Aris- 
totle, 214; fortunes of his 
"school," 232 ff. See also 
Phaenomenologie ; Conscious- 
ness. 

Hegel und Seine Zeit, by Haym, 
137. 

Heinrich von Ofterdingen, by 
Novalis, 148. 

Herz, 56, 58. 

Hindoo, mystics, 75; philos- 
ophers, 107. 

Howison, 71. 

"Humanism," a form of 
Kantianism, 235. 

Hume, 8 ff. 

Idealism, unpractical and fan- 
tastical, 67; centering about 
the self and the absolute, 70; 
in intimate relation with 
pragmatism, 85 ff . ; Hegel 's 
Phenomenology as expression 
of, 138 ff., 161 ff., 167 ff.; in 
relation to Hegel's theory of 
truth, 214 ff.; Hegel's, sum- | 

263 



marized, 230 f.; Later Prob- 
lems of, and its Present Posi- 
tion, Lecture X, passim; its 
influence, 234 ff. ; unsettled 
problems of, 245 ff. ; in rela- 
tion to pragmatism, 257 ff. 

Ideas, Plato's, 80. 

Idee, Hegel's, 221. 

Imitation of Christ, The, 180. 

Imperialism, stage in the evolu- 
tion of the Phenomenology, 
203 ff. 

Individualism, 3 f . ; romantic, 
68 ff . ; Nietzsche 's, 68 ; types 
of, 72, 75, 158, 165, 187. 

James, William, 139, 181, 239. 
Japan, 202 f . 
Jean Paul, 66. 

Kant, as student of physical 
science, 6; his view of mathe- 
matics, 10; his analysis of 
experience, 12 ff . ; as empiri- 
cist, 15 ; his categories, 19 ff. ; 
his interpretation of nature, 
26 ff . ; his view as synthesis of 
conflicting motives, 35 ff . ; his 
view of ' ' things-in -them- 
selves, " 37 f. ; his view of the 
moral self, 38 f . ; his ethics, 
391, 42 ff.; criticism of his 
table of categories, 46 f . ; his 
deduction in a nutshell, 48; 
his ontology, 55 ff . ; his phi- 
losophy reflecting spirit of 
age, 65 f.; his unsolved prob- 
lem of the self, 70 ff . ; his 
monism and his pluralism, 72 ; 
his contribution to religion, 
75; his antinomies and the 
dialectical method, 80. See 
also Deduction of the Cate- 
gories. 



INDEX 



Knowledge, Kant 's conception 
of, Lecture I, passim; in rela- 
tion to Kant 's ontology, 55 ff . 

"Law of the Heart, The," in 

Hegel's Phenomenology, 191 

f. 
Leibnitz, 243. 
Life of Hegel, by Kosenkranz, 

137. 
Literature, dialectics of the 

emotions in, 82 ff. 
Locke, 8, 33, 236. 
LogiJc, Hegel's, 213. 
Lotze, 2. 
Louis XIV, 163. 

Macbeth, 148. 
Manfred, Byron's, 83. 
Martineau, 2. 
Monism, 72. 
Mysticism, 85, 132. 

Napoleon, 72 f . 

Nature. See Philosophy of 

Nature. 
Newton, 6, 52. 
Nietzsche, 68, 82, 140. 
Noumena, 56 ff. 
Novalis, 148. 

Oedipus, 202 f . 
Omar Khayyam, 180. 

Parmenides, 78. 

Pearson, Karl, 16. 

Phaedo, 78. 

Phaedrus, 78. 

Phaenomenologie des Geistes, 
Hegel's, Lectures VI, VII, 
VIII, passim; estimate of its 
originality, 136 ff . ; expression 
of German idealism, 138 ; as a 
study of human nature, 139; 
historical background of, 141 



ff. ; philosophical presupposi- 
tions of, 143; its dialectical 
method, 144 ff . ; its likeness to 
literary type-romances, 148 
ff.; preface to, as formal 
statement of Hegel's philos- 
ophy, 156; chronological and 
logical sequence in, 162 ff. ; 
absolute idealism, outcome of, 
166 ff. ; results of, summa- 
rized, 214 ff. ; on truth, 
quoted, 215 f . 

Phenomenon, as objective, 42. 

Philosophy of Nature, need for, 
73 ff . ; estimate of Schelling 's, 
77; Schelling 's account of, 
101 ff . ; nature as unconscious 
image of the self, 104; not 
emphasized by Hegel, 147. 

Plato, 69 ; dialectical method in, 
78 f ., 154. 

"Pleasure and Destiny," in 
Hegel's Phenomenology, 191. 

Pluralism, 72. 

Pragmatism, 2; in relation to 
dialectical method, 85 f . ; in 
relation to Kantianism, 235, 
to idealism, 257 ff. 

Prometheus, 68. 

Protestantism, 3. 

Psychology, 38, 67. 

Reason, success and failure of, 
7, 10; practical, 39 ff.; its 
meaning in pre-revolutionary 
days, 65; relative to religion, 
75; as third stage in Hegel's 
account of consciousness, 157, 
185 ff.; as absolute, 220 ff.; 
in Hegel and Schopenhauer, 
245 ff. 

Religion, stage in the evolution 
of the Phenomenology, 209 
ff.; of Egypt, 210; of Greece, 



264 



INDEX 



211; in relation to philosophy, 

229. 
Bepullic, Plato's, 78. 
Kevolution, 65 ff., 72, 81 f ., 165, 

205 f. 
Eickert, 237. 

Boilers, The, Schiller's, 194. 
Eomantic irony, 68. 
Eomantic Movement, 3 f ., 64, 

68, 190. 
Eosenkranz, 137; quoted, 155. 

St. Augustine, 253. 

Sartor Besartus, by Carlyle, 
147 ff. 

Schelling, estimate of, 76 ff . ; 
the dialectical method in, Lec- 
ture IV, passim; contrast to 
Fichte, 99 ff . ; primarily de- 
voted to theoretical construc- 
tion, 100; his interpretation 
of nature as dialectical, 101 
ff.; as evolutionist, 103; his 
interpretation of the self as 
productive genius, 121, as 
identity, 132 £., 141 1, 146 f ., 
145, 160, 167, 169, 177, 201, 
248. 

Schiller, 68, 194. 

Schlegel, Friedrich, 68. 

School, Hegelian, fortunes of, 
232 ff. 

Schopenhauer, 2, 140, 247 ff. 

Self -consciousness, idealistic the- 
ory of, 90 ff . ; Fichte 's analy- 
sis of, 96 ff.; Schelling 's 
interpretation of, 105 ff . ; ex- 
plained in terms of social 
consciousness, 125 ff.; as so- 
cial contrast effect, 127 f.; as 
second stage in Hegel's ac- 
count of ' ' consciousness, ' ' 
156. 

Self, the, Kant's conception of, 



Lecture II, passim; its rela- 
tion to ' ' things in them- 
selves," 37 ff.; as moral 
agent, 38 f.; the ethical "I" 
vs. the psychological "me," 
39, 42 ff.; as originator of 
experience, 44 ; as principle of 
philosophy for post-Kantians, 
49 f ., 90 ; in relation to the 
Absolute, 54; prominent in 
German thought, 67 ff . ; es- 
sentially dialectical, 90 ff . ; 
Fichte 's analysis of, 96 ff. ; 
Fichte 's ethical conception of, 
99; Schelling 's view of na- 
ture, in terms of, 101 ff.; 
Schelling 's analysis of, 105 
ff.; as both object and sub- 
ject, 108 ff. ; artistic activity, 
as illustration of, 121; as 
creative principle, 129; as 
identity of conscious and 
unconscious processes, 123 ff . ; 
analogous to Hegel's term 
Weltgeist, 149; nature of, in 
contrast with Absolute, 171 
ff. ; as ' ' Everyman, " 188 ; as 
Hegel's Absolute, 221 ff. 

Skepticism, 1791 

Social consciousness, as source 
of self -consciousness, 125 ff. 

Socialism, 3. 

Socrates, 78 f., 154. 

Sophist, Plato 's, 78 

Sophocles, 202. 

Space, in relation to dialectical 
method, 80. 

Spencer, Herbert, 7. 

Spinoza, 7. 

Spirit, fourth stage in Hegel's 
account of consciousness, 157; 
identical with Absolute, 174; 
as organized social order, 
200 ff. 



265 



INDEX 



Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 

The, early history of idealism 

in, 64. 
Stanzas to Augusta, Byron's, 

quoted, 192 f. 
Stoicism, 1781 
" Storm and Stress," 66, 82. 
Strauss, 2. 
Substance, Kant's category of, 

20. 
Svn thesis, Fichte's principle of, 

98. 

Tennyson, quoted, 189. 

Theaetetus, 78. 

11 Things-in-themselves, " prob- 
lem and modification of, 36 
ff. ; partly inarticulate and 
partly ethical, 40; revision of, 
by Kant 's followers, 41 ff . 

Tieck, Ludwig, 149. 

Time, in relation to dialectical 
method, 80. 

Tolstoi, 141. 

Truth, as dialectical, 94 ff . ; as 
the whole, 155; Hegel's the- 
ory of, summarized, 214 ff. 

Type-romance, 148. 



' ' Unhappy Consciousness, The, ' ' 

analysis of, 180 ff. 
Unity, of experience, 53 f., 57. 
Upanishads, 107. 

Varieties of Religious Expe- 
rience, by James, 139. 
Vita Nuova, Dante's, 192. 
Vocation of Man, Fichte's, 68. 
von Hartmann, 2, 249. 

Walt Whitman, 140 f. 

TVeltgeist, analogy with term 
self, 149; Phenomenology, as 
biography of, 150; "trans- 
migrations" of, 151 f.; 
viewed as "Everyman," 188. 

Wilhelm Meister, Goethe's, 83, 
147 f. 

William Lovell, by Tieck, 149. 

Windelband, 137. 

WirlclicKkeit, category of, 225. 

Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte 's, 63, 
96 ff. 

"Wotan, 150. 

Zeller, 137. 



266 



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